BOOK II

THREE POTTERS

I

LONDON once a year has a brief spell of youth, during which she is surpassingly beautiful, gay, insolent, and very nearly as vivid and riotous as the tropics. Her gray besooted old masses of architecture are but the background for green parks where swans sail on slowly moving streams; thousands of window boxes, flaunting red, white, and yellow; miles of plate-glass windows, whose splendid display, whether torn from the earth, or representing unthinkable toil at the loom, the rape of the feathered tribe, or countless brains no longer laid out in cells but in intricate patterns of lace, hot veldts where the ostrich, quite indifferent to the depletion of his tail, walks as absurdly as the pupil of Delsarte, slaughter-houses of hideless beasts, compensated in death with silver and gold, the ravishing of greenhouses, and the luscious fruits that grow only between earth and glass,—all these wonders lining curved streets and crowded “circuses,” challenge the coldest eye above the tightest purse. And in the fashionable streets during the morning are women as pretty and gay of attire as the flower beds in the Park, where they display themselves of an afternoon.

Julia, happy in her own unsullied eager youth, made the acquaintance of London when that seasoned old dame was taking her yearly elixir of life, and thought herself come to Paradise. She had hardly a word for her aunt, Mrs. Winstone, who had met her at the railway station, but twisted her neck to look at the shop windows, the hoary old palaces and churches, the passing troops of cavalry, gorgeous as exotics, the monuments to heroes, the bare-kneed Scot in his kilt, and the Oriental in his turban. It was Mrs. Winstone’s hour for driving, and as her young guest’s frock had not been made for Hyde Park, and Julia had laughed when asked if she were tired, the constitutional was taken through the streets and in or about the smaller parks. The coachman was far too haughty himself to venture beyond the West End, or even to skirt those purlieus which lie at its back doors.

Julia’s eyes, wide and star-like as they were, missed not a detail, and she felt as happy as on the night of her first party. The journey had been monotonous, the passengers, when not ill, rather dull. Therefore was her plastic mind shaped to drink down in great draughts the pleasures promised by the city of her dreams. Moreover, never in her life had she felt so well. The eighteen days at sea, the wholesome food, the constant exercise in which a good sailor always indulges, if only to get away with the time, long days in cold salt air, had crimsoned her blood, vitalized every organ. France and the reason of her translation to London she had almost forgotten. There had been a hurried marriage at Great House; then, almost before the wine had been tasted, the indignant bridegroom had been summoned to his ship, which, with the rest of the squadron, had sailed two hours later. There had been a succession of infuriated letters, mailed at the different islands, and Julia knew that France intended to leave the service as soon as he set foot in England; but as that could not be for weeks to come, she had dismissed him from her mind.

“Shall I live here?” she asked at length, as they drove down the wide Mall, one of the finest avenues in Christendom, and half rising to look at Buckingham Palace.

“You should know.” Mrs. Winstone had received only a cablegram from her sister. “France has a house, a bit of a place in Hertfordshire, but only rooms in town, so far as I know. The duke, however, may ask you to stop with him in St. James’s Square—for a bit. He seems enchanted to get France married, but it is rather fortunate that I have known him for years and can vouch for you. France, returning with a bride from the antipodes—well—”

“Of course the duke would expect some one much older, Mr. France is so old himself. But I’m glad he doesn’t mind, for I want to live in castles. It’s too bad Mr. France hasn’t one.”

“Is that what you married France for? I have wondered.”

Julia shrugged her restless young shoulders, and looked at the carriages full of finery rolling between the columns of Hyde Park.

“Mother told me to marry him and I did, of course. I have known, ever since I was about eight, that I was to marry at this time and start upon some wonderful career, for there’s no getting the best of the planets. I had to take the man who came along at the right moment.”

Mrs. Winstone was one of those extremely smart English women who put on an expression of youthful vacuity with their public toilettes, but at this point she so far forgot herself as to sit up and gasp.

“Not that old nonsense! You don’t mean to tell me that Jane still believes—why, I had forgotten the thing. Hinson! Home!”

As the carriage turned and rolled toward Tilney Street Mrs. Winstone, really interested for the first time, stared hard at the face beside her. Had she a child on her hands? It had been rather a bore, the prospect of fitting out and putting through her preliminary paces a young West Indian bride, mooning the while for an absent groom. But she had never seen any one look less like a bride, more heart-whole.

“Do you love France?” she asked abruptly.

“Of course not. He’s a horrid funny old thing, and his eyes look like glass when they don’t look like Fawcett’s when he’s been drinking, poor darling. And some of his hair is gray. But of course he’ll die soon and then I’ll have a handsome young husband.”

Mrs. Winstone regarded the tip of her boot. She was worldly, selfish, vain, envied this young relative who would one day be a duchess, but she had an abundant store of that good nature which is the brass but pleasant counterfeit of a kind heart. She would not put herself out for any one, unless there were amusement or profit in it for her pampered self, but she would do so much if there were, that she had the reputation of being one of the “nicest women in London.” It was a long time—she was a widow of thirty-four, and enjoyed a comfortable income—since she had felt a spasm of natural sympathy, but she put this sensation to her credit as she turned again to the child beside her.

“I wish I had gone down to Nevis last year, as I half intended,” she remarked. “It would have been good for my nerves, too. But there is such a vast difference between the ages of your mother and myself—we are at the opposite ends of a good old West Indian family—and we don’t get on very well. If I had—tell me about the wedding. I suppose it was a great affair. Where did you go for the honeymoon?”

“No, I didn’t have a fine wedding. One day Mr. France was just calling, when the minister of Fig Tree Church was also there, and mother told us to stand up and be married. A few minutes after a sailor came running up with an order from the Captain to Mr. France to go to the ship at once. Before he had a chance to return the squadron sailed. For some reason the Captain didn’t want us to marry, and mother was delighted at getting the best of him. I never knew her to be in such a good humor as she was all the rest of that day and the next. But the Captain must have been as cross as Mr. France when he found out he was too late. Mother and the planets are too much for anybody.”

Mrs. Winstone had learned all she wished to know. Mrs. Edis would have been wholly—no doubt satirically—content with the resolution born instantly in her sister’s agile mind. France would not arrive for a month or six weeks. There was nothing for it but to make his bride so worldly and frivolous that some of this appalling innocence would disappear in the process. Mrs. Winstone did not take kindly to the task, being fastidious and tolerably decent, but having read the book of life by artificial light for many years, could arrive at no other solution of her problem.

“France has been cabling frantically to be relieved, has even sent his resignation, but either there is no one to take his place on such short notice, or some one is exerting a counter-influence—possibly your good friend, the Captain—and he must wait until the squadron returns. Meanwhile, we shall not let you miss him. The duke has sent me a check for your trousseau, and this is the very height of the season—here we are. It is a box, but I hope you will not be uncomfortable.”

Among other considerations, Mrs. Winstone did not permit herself to forget that now was her opportunity to ingratiate herself with a future peeress of Britain. “Although anything less like a duchess,” she thought grimly as she laid her arm lightly about Julia’s waist while ascending the stair, “I never saw out of America or on the stage. But the duke, good soul, will be delighted.”

The house, small, like so many in Mayfair, was all drawing-room on the first floor, a right angle of a room, so shaped and furnished as to give it an air of spaciousness. The front window was open to the flower boxes; there was a narrow conservatory across the back, which added to its depth. Above were one large bedroom and two small ones; and those of the servants, a flight higher, were a disgrace to civilization.

But all that was intended for polite eyes presented a picture of ease, luxury, taste, smartness; moreover, had the unattainable air of having been occupied for several generations. Americans and other outsiders, settling for a season or two in London, spend thousands of pounds to look as if living in a packing-case of expensive goods, but Englishwomen of moderate income, combined with traditions and certain inheritances, often give the impression of aristocratic wealth and luxury.

Captain Winstone (recruited also from the generous navy) had inherited the house in Tilney Street from his mother, an old dame of taste and fashion, who, besides careful weeding in the possessions of her ancestors, had travelled much and bought with a fine discrimination that was a part of her hardy contempt for Victorian fashions. The house, with three thousand pounds a year, was Mrs. Winstone’s for so long as she should grace this planet, and enabled her to exist, even to pay her dressmakers on account, when they made nuisances of themselves. But although she would have liked a great income, she had never been tempted to marry again, holding that a widow who sacrificed her liberties for anything less than a peerage was a fool; and no peer had crossed her path wealthy enough to be disinterested, or poor enough to share her humble dowry with gratitude. She always carried on a mild flirtation with a tame cat a few years younger than herself, who would fetch and carry, and, if wealthy, make her nice presents. If not, she fed him and took him to drive in her Victoria. Her heart and passions never troubled her, but her vanity required constant sustenance. She did not in the least mind the implication when the infant-in-waiting was invited to the country houses she visited; not only was her vanity flattered, but the generous tolerance of her world always amused her. She lived on the surface of life, and altogether was an enviable woman.

Julia was delighted with her little room, done up in fresh chintz, too absorbed and happy to notice that it overlooked a mews. A four-wheeler had already brought her box, and a maid had unpacked her modest wardrobe. Mrs. Winstone, glancing over it with a suppressed sigh, told her to put on something white, as people would drop in for tea, then retired to the large front bedroom to be arrayed in a tea-gown of pink chiffon and much French lace.

II

MRS. WINSTONE, an excessively pretty woman, with blue eyes and fair hair, and a fresh complexion responsive to the arts of rejuvenation, seated herself before the tea-table and arranged her expression, determined not to betray her feelings when Julia entered in a white muslin frock made by the seamstress of Nevis. But as Julia, with all the confidence of an only child (such had practically been her position), entered smiling, her hair pinned softly about her head, Mrs. Winstone’s own spontaneous smile, which did so much for her popularity, without seaming the satin of her skin, responded. She saw at once what had dawned upon even Mrs. Edis’s provincial and scientific mind, that the girl at least knew how to put on her clothes, that she could wear white muslin and a blue sash and neck ribbon with an air.

“We shall have jolly times with the shops and dressmakers,” she said warmly. “We’ll begin to-morrow morning. You are to be presented at the last drawing-room and must go into training at once. The duke wishes it. Really, I didn’t think there’d be anything so excitin’ this season as puttin’ the wife of Harold France through her paces. How do, Algy?”

She extended a finger to a young man who lounged in with a bored expression, and a dragging of one foot after the other that suggested excesses which were preparing him for an early grave; in truth, he was a virtuous and timid younger son, who, being able to afford but one vice, chose cigarettes, and in the privacy of his room—he lived at home—smoked the economical American.

Mrs. Winstone, with the vagueness of her kind, murmured, “my niece,” and poured him out a cup of tea, while embarking smartly upon a tide of gossip anent “Sonnys” and “Berties,” “Mollys” and “Vickys,” to which Julia had no key. But she was quite content to be ignored, being entirely happy, and deeply interested in her aunt and her new surroundings. With a quick and appreciative instinct she admired the rectangular room with its soft light and French furniture, its hundred little treasures from India and the continent. The tea-service was fairylike, compared with the massive pieces of Great House, and eminently in harmony with the pretty butterfly and her slender fluttering hands. Mrs. Winstone, as has been intimated, cultivated an expression of complete ingenuousness, even in animated conversation, and in repose—as when driving alone, for instance—looked so drained of vulgar sensations, of that capacity for thought so necessary to the middle classes, poor dears, that even an Englishman was once heard to exclaim that he would like to throw a wet sponge at her. Her figure might have been taller, but it could hardly have been thinner, and carried smart gowns as an angel carries her natural feathers. Women liked her, not only for the reasons given, but because her acute intelligence chose that they should, and men liked, sometimes loved, her because she knew them as well as she did women, and managed them accordingly.

Her present adorer, Lord Algernon FitzMiff, was tall, loose-jointed, with sleek brown hair, a mathematical profile, and beautiful clothes. He would never pay his tailor; never, unless he caught an heiress, own a thousand pounds. But at least a Chinaman on his first visit to England would never have taken him for a member of the middle class; and when a man is no disgrace to “his order,” who shall maintain that his life is wasted?

Julia, finding him even less interesting than her husband, was on the other side of the room admiring an old bronze brought to England in the palmy days of the East India Company, when three visitors were announced:—

“Mrs. Macmanus, Mr. Pirie, Mr. Nigel Herbert.”

“Dear Julia!” cried Mrs. Winstone, in a tone which, although subdued, made an effect of floating across space until the drawing-room seemed immense, “come and meet my friends.”

Julia, born without mauvaise honte, passed the ordeal of introduction in a fashion which delighted her aunt, and sat down under the lorgnette of Mrs. Macmanus.

This intimate friend of Mrs. Winstone was also in her thirty-fifth year, but enormously rich, as lazy of body as she was quick of mind, and, inclined to gout, quite indifferent to both youth and clothes. Her black frock would not have been worn by her maid, her stays were of the old school, her hair was parted, and about her eyes were many amiable lines. There were those who maintained that she was a snob of the subtlest dye, daring to look like a frump because of her income and her ramifications in the peerage; but they were quite wrong. Mrs. Macmanus was so little of a snob that she rarely recognized snobbery in others, hated every variety of discomfort, and could not have been more amiable and kind-hearted had she been poor and a nobody.

Mr. Pirie, although only forty-five, was already an old beau. Left with an income sufficient for a luxurious bachelor, too selfish to ask the present Mrs. Macmanus to share it when she was a penniless girl, and with none of the recommendations essential to the capture of predatory heiresses, he had lived for twenty-five years in very comfortable rooms in Jermyn Street, dining out every night during the season, taking his yearly waters at Carlsbad, visiting at country houses. In no way distinguished, people wondered sometimes why they continued, year after year, to invite him; but he had been astute enough to hang on until he had become a fixed habit, and now, should any of the ailments which come from too much dining with owners of chefs take him off, he would have been sincerely missed for a season; he was a good-natured gossip, who could put vitriol on his tongue at the unique moment. Mrs. Macmanus had been free for fifteen years, and he had proposed to her fifteen times; but not only was that astute widow content with her present state, but she never quite forgave him for not proposing before he was obliged to wear a toupee. She liked him, however, and gave him a corner at her fireside. For several years she had tried to make him work, being of that order of woman that has no patience with the idler. In her youth, she had been quite impassioned on the subject, but had learned that to backbone the invertebrate was as easy as to turn marble into flesh. When, a few years later, the Americans discovered the hookworm, she concluded that half England had it, and became entirely charitable.

Young Herbert, who immediately carried his tea over to Julia’s side, was but recently out of Oxford, reading law to please his father (an eminently practical peer), but quietly preparing himself for literature. He had a fresh frank face, which refused to look politely bored, large blue eyes, that danced at times with youth and the zest of life, and although dressed with the perfection of detail of a Lord Algy FitzMiff, his movements, like his voice, were often quick and eager. He had been cultivating Mrs. Winstone with a view to succeeding Lord Algy, since she was so much the fashion, and rippin’ besides, but she vanished from his calculations the moment he set eyes on her niece, and never returned.

He had heard nothing of the marriage, Mrs. Winstone with fashionable casualness having omitted to mention it, and society being as indifferent to the performances of a man who spent his leaves of absence in Paris, as to the heir presumptive of an unfashionable duke.

“Miss France—surely—” he began. But Julia bridled. She was proud of her married state. She sat up very straight and looked at him primly.

He laughed aloud. “Really?” he asked teasingly. “Well, I suppose you are too young to like to be told you look so, but—I can’t take it in. Do I know your husband, perhaps? France—there are several. You are a bride, of course.”

“I have been married just twenty-four days. My husband is a lieutenant in the navy. He won’t be here for a month or two yet—”

“In the navy—what—what—is his first name?”

“Harold. He has a lot of others, but I forget them.”

“Not the Duke of Kingsborough’s—”

“Yes, and Aunt Maria says perhaps I shall stay at some of the castles this year.”

Herbert’s hand shook so that he was obliged to put down his cup. He was almost a generation younger than France, and rarely entered his own club, but there are some characters that are known to all men of their class, however unpopular or negligible socially they may be. Herbert felt a sensation of nausea, and for the moment loathed this wonderful young creature that looked to be composed of light and fire. What must she really be made of to have fallen in love with a man like France? What sort of hideous inherited instincts had answered those of a man that did not even possess the common gift of magnetism? What had he made of her?

He had been bred in the severe school of his class. His composure returned and he looked at her critically. Red hair. A sensual and ill-tempered little devil, no doubt. Then he encountered her eyes, eyes so unmistakably innocent, so different from the eyes of the Mrs. Winstones, with their manufactured ingenuousness, their injected wonder at the naughtiness of the world.

But he floundered. “Oh, of course. Castles. And of course, Mr. France is very handsome—distinguished.”

Julia was staring at him in open astonishment. “Handsome? He looks like a sheep, when he doesn’t look like a calf—that’s the way he looked when he stared at me while mother was talking to him. I had never talked to a man in my life. He must have thought me quite stupid. I am sure he was very kind to marry me.”

“Kind?”

“Mother said he was in love, but somehow—well, I have only read a few of Scott’s novels—he doesn’t seem much like a lover to me. But after I’ve seen the world a bit, and read some modern novels, perhaps I shall understand Mr. France better. I should think it would be a good thing to understand one’s husband.”

“Rather.” He was devoured with curiosity, and changed the subject hastily. “What is your idea of a man that could make love, fall in love?” he asked, not yet quite sure whether he liked her well enough even for a mild flirtation.

But Julia had liked him spontaneously. His youth, his breeding, his frank kind eyes, the mere fact that he was the first man near her own age with whom she had ever had a tête-à-tête, won her confidence, and fluttered her imagination. She regarded him dispassionately.

“You, I should think. But I don’t know very much—anything about it.”

Was this accomplished coquetry? But those eyes. “Will you tell me where you have come from?” he asked. “I—I can’t quite place you.”

“From Nevis, where Aunt Maria was born.”

“And there are no men there?”

“No young ones. I met Mr. France at my first party, anyhow. I had no friends—not even girls. My mother is peculiar—a very wonderful woman. Some day I’ll tell you about her. But she made up her mind I was to have no friends until I married.”

Herbert made another heroic attempt to repress his curiosity. “And why do you think I could fall in love—really in love?”

“Well—you see—you look elastic, springy, waxy, sappy, like the young trees. Mr. France is all made, hard, finished. He’s like an old tree with rough bark, and dry inside. I suppose he could love when he was your age, but he’s years too old now. I shall always think of him as a father—my father had a son eighteen years old when he was Mr. France’s age—and I was eighteen my last birthday.”

Herbert drew a long breath. He put his finger inside his collar and shot a glance at the rest of the party. They were discussing the resignation of Gladstone and his indictment of the peers; English people, no matter how frivolous, are never as empty-headed as Americans of the same class. Moreover, Mrs. Winstone included several flirtations in the curriculum, and looked upon Herbert as quite safe.

The question popped out irresistibly. “Then your mother arranged the match?”

“Of course.”

“And—and—you aren’t in love with your husband now that you’re married to him? Girls often are, you know.”

“What difference does that make?”

“Well—I should think France would know how to make love even if he couldn’t love—I fancy you’ve hit him off there.”

“Well, he may, but I hope he won’t. Forty! He used to talk a good deal about wanting to settle down. So, I suppose he’ll do that, and I am sure I could run a house as well as mother.”

“Run a house! Is that the way he made love to you?”

“He never made love to me. Mother always entertained him, and he had to sail as soon as the ceremony was over, instead of taking me up into the hills, as he had planned.”

Herbert felt a wild sense of exultation and an equally wild impulse to save her. The finest type of young Englishman inherits a deep and passionate tide of chivalry, and his was whipped hard and high for the first time. A crime had been committed, a worse one menaced; this he would avert if he had to elope with the child and ruin his career. There was no room left in him for humor; it was the best plan he could think of, just as Mrs. Winstone’s plan to make her innocent little niece so frivolous, worldly, and sophisticated that in a measure she would be prepared for life with one of the most blatant roués in England, was the best her order of brain could evolve. And Julia, plastic, unawakened, inexperienced, gave the impression of being entirely agreeable to any plans that might be made for her.

Herbert, young and chivalrous as he might be, and still able to fall in love at first sight, was the product of the highest civilization on earth, and in no danger of making a precipitate ass of himself. He also was as subtle as a frank and honest nature can be, and he realized that he must proceed warily. An innocent girl can be repelled even by a young and attractive lover, and Mrs. Winstone, although she would smile at a flirtation, would be the last to countenance a scandal in her family. Moreover, it was possible that he might be mistaken in the sensations inspired by this girl with the big shining happy eyes, hair that looked as if about to crackle, and a sort of electric aura. He had been in love before, and recovered with humiliating facility. His reason spoke, but all the rest of him cried out that he was in love, desperately in love, that it was the real thing, at last. And she needed him. That clinched the matter.

He changed the subject abruptly, and, as much as possible, the current of his thoughts. “Of course Mrs. Winstone is enchanting, ripping,” he announced warmly. “Quite the youngest woman in London” (this, without insulting intent). “But after all, you _are_ just grown, and must have friends of your own age. My sister, alas! is in India, but one of her pals married my brother—and her great friend, Lady Ishbel Jones—we are all great pals. I’m sure you’ll like them both—”

“When shall I meet them? Are they my age?”

“Only a little older—twenty-three. Ishbel was married when she was nineteen—her husband is rather a bounder, but unspeakably rich, and she was one of fourteen daughters of a poor Irish peer. Bridgit, my sister-in-law, married for love—my brother is one of the best looking men in the army. She married at eighteen—and has a little chap, but she’s one of the best cross-country riders in England, and a topper at golf and tennis; fine all-round sport, and loves society as much as Ishbel. _She’s_ sweeter, more feminine on the outside, but no more of a brick, and all-there-all-the-time than Bridgit. I’m sure they’re just the friends for you.”

“I’m rather afraid of them; they’re really grown women, and I know quite well that I’m only a child. I realized it a bit the night of my first party at Government House, when I saw the other girls flirting; and on the steamer they teased me a good deal. But I _must_ have some friends of my age. I am beginning to long for them. It is so odd—I was quite happy alone—so long as I knew nothing else. And I didn’t care to marry for years, but—” She gave a side glance at the intent face as close to hers as the etiquette of the drawing-room permitted, hesitated an instant, for she was growing sensitive about her ignorance. But the friendly admiring eyes reassured her, and out came the story of the planets. It was the last straw. Herbert left the house in Tilney Street feeling the one romantic man in England, and almost shaking with excitement.

III

THE duke, a dry ascetic little man, called on the following day and approved of Julia at once. He was not only relieved that his heir had married an innocent girl of good family, but youth was needed in the house of France. His sisters were older and more antiquated than himself, and now that his health was improving, he wished to give political parties and dinners. A beautiful young woman at the head of his staircase or table was an attraction second only to a chef. He hoped she was not quite a fool, and invited her to lunch alone with him in the course of the week, with intent to ascertain if her mind was of a quality that would sprout the seeds he was willing to implant—he was by way of being intellectual himself.

But it was some time before Julia could be drawn out. The big gloomy dining-room, the little man with his dull cold eyes and languid manner, the magnificent footmen, four besides the butler, to wait upon the two seated so far apart at the table, paralyzed her spirits and courage. Moreover, she was bewildered and somewhat fatigued by five days of shopping, milliners, dressmakers, and meeting many more of her aunt’s friends. She felt half disposed to cry, and nearly choked over her food. The duke was rather pleased by her timidity than disappointed; it was not often that he inspired awe (like all little men without personality it had been the dream of his life to electrify a room as he entered it, and annihilate with the eagle in his glance), and, being a gentleman of the old school, he held that young females should be diffident to their natural lords, and modest withal.

With dessert the small army of minions disappeared, and Julia’s face brightened.

“I suppose I’ll get used to all this grandeur in time, but aunt has only one footman, and at home—well, the blacks take turns waiting on the table, whichever happens to have nothing else to do, and they are part of the family, anyhow.”

The duke was shocked, but interested; shocked that even a new recruit to the ranks of the British peerage should be so frank about domestic poverty, and interested in the innocence or the courage which prompted her to speak to the head of the house of France as if he were a parson’s son.

“Quite so. Quite so,” he said genially. “Harold has rather a small establishment himself, but well appointed, of course. Ah—it’s let. I hope you will spend the greater part of your time with me. It is a new experience to see a young face at this table, and a very delightful one.” He had never felt more gracious, and Julia smiled upon him so radiantly that he expanded still further. “Yes, you must certainly live with me. And Harold must stand for Parliament. Now that he has resigned from the navy that will be the career for him. We Frances always have careers, we have never been idlers, and I need some one in the lower House. He could not choose a better moment. The present ministry is in a state of dissolution. You will like politics, of course. All intelligent women do, and more than one woman of this family has been of—ah—quite material assistance to her husband.”

“I don’t know anything about politics, but I can learn. Mother says I must. When can I go to a castle?”

The duke’s mouth was close and ascetic, but it parted in a smile that was almost spontaneous. “Of course you want to see a castle,” he said, teasing her graciously. “All children do.”

Julia flushed and tossed her head. “Well, I’m not so sorry I’m really young. I’ve been in London only a week, but it seems to me that I’ve met hundreds of women who think of nothing but looking young. So, what is there to be ashamed of?”

“Or to blush about? I perceive that we shall be famous friends. You shall go to a castle as soon as Harold returns. I’ll lend him Bosquith for the honeymoon. His own box would not be half romantic enough.”

Julia had been warned by her aunt not to confide her conjugal indifference to the duke, but she remarked impulsively:—

“One couldn’t be romantic with Mr. France, anyhow. I’d rather go there by myself, or with two or three of my new friends.”

“Great heavens!” For the first time in his life the duke (who always conducted family prayers for the servants, even in the height of the season) was almost profane. “Really—upon my word—you must not say such things—nor feel them. I am aware of the circumstances of your marriage, and that you have not had time to learn to love your husband as a wife should, but you must take wifely love and duty for granted. You are married and that is the end of it. As for romance, of course I was only joking. No doubt I was somewhat clumsy, for I rarely joke; romance does not matter in the least, and you must look forward to living with your husband as the highest of—ahem!—earthly happiness. And I must insist that you do not call Harold ‘Mr. France.’ It is not only unnatural, but American. I do not know any Americans, but am told that the wives always allude to their husbands as ‘Mr.’ In a novel I once read, ‘The Wide, Wide, World,’ they always _called_ them ‘Mr.’ It must have been extremely awkward! You will remember, I hope.”

“Yes, sir.”

Julia looked down, and repressed a smile. She might be ignorant and provincial, but she was naturally shrewd and poised; the duke no longer awed her, and, indeed, seemed rather absurd. But, then, she had met so many absurd people in the last few days. She thought with gratitude upon young Herbert and his two enchanting friends, Bridgit Herbert and Ishbel Jones. In the wild rush of her new life they had passed and repassed one another like flashes of lightning, but there had been distinct and agreeable shocks, and she was to lunch with the two young women on the morrow. It was a prospect that consoled her for the ennui of her ordeal with this quite nice but very dull old gentleman.

The duke, however, convinced that he had made an impression, and magnanimously overlooking the indiscretions of youth, kept her for an hour longer, and gave her an outline lesson in politics. He was extremely lucid and chose his words with the precision which distinguished all his public utterances (he fancied his style); also reminded himself that he was addressing an embryonic intelligence. Julia looked at him with wide admiring eyes and thought of Herbert and Bridgit and Ishbel.

IV

THERE were, at this period of their lives, no two more frivolous and pleasure-loving young women in England than Bridgit Herbert and Ishbel Jones. The one, married three months after she had left the schoolroom, the other rescued suddenly from a ruined castle where food was often scanty and a travelling bog the only excitement, both had thrown themselves into the complex pleasures of society with such ardor and industry that neither had yet found time to discover they were clever women and their husbands two of the dullest men in England.

Mr. James William Jones (alluded to as “Jimmy” to please the enchanting Ishbel, although men let him alone as much as they decently could, unless greedy for tips of the stock market, or the salary of a director on one of his boards) was as generous with money as behoved a newcomer with a beautiful young wife, and a passion for entertaining the British peerage. He might be a bore and a bounder, but he knew what he wanted and he knew how to get it. At forty he was a millionnaire, and, resting on his labors (for Britons, unlike Americans, know when they have enough), became aware that outside of the City he was a nobody. Simultaneously he lifted his gaze to that stellar world known as Society. He read of it, he stared at it from afar—a park chair (for which he paid two pence), an opera stall for which he paid a guinea—and blinked in its radiance. He was first wistful, then angry, then determined. He had many golden keys, but was not long in learning that none would open the door guarding the golden stair. He was an ugly rather flat-featured Welshman, with eyes like black beads and the manners of his native village; he met gentlemen every day in the City, and, being a man of facts, knew himself exactly for what he was. Nevertheless, he would win society as he had won fortune, and (with no keen relish) admitted that for the first time in his life he must stoop to ask the aid of woman. In other words, he must get him a wife, and she must be a lady of high degree. By this time his conclusions were rapid. Being a city millionaire, without youth, looks, or manners, he would have to buy his wife. Ergo, she must be poor.

He immediately embarked upon a study of the British peerage, and with the thoroughness and capacity for detail which play so great a part in the equipment of the self-made, he had within a week a list of impoverished peers long enough to reach to France.

But how was he to meet any of them? He was a solitary man, having had no time to make friends, and, proud in his way, risked no rebuffs from those suave well-groomed beings who honored the City for its base returns. He had not even a poor peer on one of his boards, having, in the old days, regarded them as useless and dangerous.

It was at this point that luck (also an ally of the self-made) came at his call. He was plodding through a society paper when his eye was caught by an editorial paragraph, mysteriously worded. He read it several times, grasped its meaning, and, the hour being propitious, went at once to the editorial offices of _The Mart_, in Bond Street. Ushered into the presence of the widowed and impoverished lady of some quality who edited the sheet, he asked her bluntly, holding out the paragraph, if “this meant that she introduced people into Society for a consideration.” She colored a dusky crimson at this coarse adaptation of her delicate literary style, but they were not long coming to an understanding, nevertheless. She agreed with him that his only hope was in a wife of the right sort, and asked him to call again a week later. When he returned, she had his record as well as his remedy. With the calm and brazen assurance of which only the well-born thrown on their uppers are capable, she demanded a thousand pounds for her letter of introduction, and another thousand if the wedding came off. He had always despised women and now he laughed outright; nevertheless, when he discovered that the letter was to a poor proud Irish peer, connected with several of the most notable families in England, and the melancholy possessor of fourteen beautiful daughters, ranging from thirty-five years of age to sixteen, he signed the check and the agreement.

The desperate Irish landlord, duly advised from London, received him with true Celtic hospitality, and practically bade him take his choice. As Lady Ishbel was the family’s flower, Jones made up his mind cautiously and promptly, asking for her hand on his third visit. His leaking unventilated quarters in the village inn, and the harsh food of the peer (like many self-made men he was on a diet) had somewhat to do with his rapidity of decision.

Ishbel wept sadly when she received the paternal decree, for she was young and romantic, and her suitor was neither. But not only had she been taught from infancy that marriage was the one escape from bogs and potatoes, and, like her sisters, had lived on the forlorn hope of being invited to London by more fortunate relatives, but she had one of the sweetest and kindest natures in the world; and when her mother wept, and her father told her that Mr. Jones, moved to his depths at the straits of a member of even the Irish peerage, had intimated that he would make him a director of one of his companies, with a salary which would insure him against hunger, and patch up his castle, and when her older sisters urged that she might sacrifice her feelings in order to marry them off in turn, she dried her beautiful eyes, and consented.

Mr. Jones returned at once to London to prepare for his bride, and, again with the help of the Lady of the Bureau, bought him a furnished house in Park Lane. This fact, his many virtues, and his approaching marriage to the “greatest beauty in Ireland” (the Lady of the Bureau by this time felt something like gratitude to her victim and resolved to give him a handsome return for his checks) were duly chronicled in _The Mart_. The marriage took place at the beginning of the season, and Ishbel’s many relatives received her affectionately and launched her at once, swallowing Mr. Jones without a grimace. Thanks to Nature, her husband’s millions, and the friendly _Mart_, she became a “beauty” in her first season, and was so intoxicated with the many and delectable dishes offered her starved young palate, that she tolerated and almost forgot her husband. He, in turn, took little interest in her, save as a means to an end. He had bought her as he had bought women before, and, being a plain matter-of-fact person, thought one sort about as good as another. However, he gave her an immense income, and, satisfying himself that she was honest and virtuous, in spite of her irresistible coquetry, left her to her own devices.

She had little education, and no accomplishments, but she studied for an hour and a half every morning with the best masters to be found, and her natural wit and charm, added to her rich Irish beauty, and the sweetness of her disposition, endeared her even to disappointed mothers, and won her something more than popularity in the young married set. The woman with whom she soon drifted into the closest intimacy was, apparently, as unlike herself in all respects as possible.

Bridgit Marchamely, educated with her brothers, and highly accomplished, inherited a fortune from her mother, the only child of a Liverpool shipbuilder, who had married the younger son of a duke. With a mind both subtle and powerful, this lady had ruled her husband during the twenty years of their happiness, brought up her children to think for themselves, and played with society when it suited her convenience. Bridgit, the last of her four children, was the only girl, and with her fine upstanding figure, her flashing black eyes and spirited nostrils, looked as gallant a boy as any of her brothers when she rode astride to hounds in the privacy of her grandfather’s estate in Yorkshire. In spite of what her tutors called her masculine brain, however, she was no traitor to her sex, and fell madly in love with a handsome guardsman in the first week of her first season. Her father thought young Herbert “rather an ass,” but failing to convince his daughter, gave his consent to the match; and she had since kept the young man luxuriously in South Audley Street. She, too, had grown up in the country, being brought to London for a few weeks of opera and concert once a year only, and, her youth getting the better of her fine brain for the nonce, she lived for society in the season and for shooting and hunting and visits to the continent the rest of the year. The fashionable life is the busiest on earth, while its glamor lasts, and with a husband of the old familiar Greek god type (now exclusively English) as fond of the world’s pleasures as herself, and her baby where English babies so sensibly and generally are,—in the country the year round,—it is no wonder that she forgot her studies and aspirations and became a flaming comet in London society.

She was instantly attracted to Ishbel, by the law of opposites she thought, but, as she learned in later years, by a deep-lying similarity of character and mind, at present unsuspected beneath the effervescence of their youth.

Both of these young women were almost as fond of Nigel Herbert as of each other, and although he forbore to confide to them his ultimate purpose in regard to Julia, were properly horrified at the “box that red-headed little Nevis girl had got herself into,” and sympathetic with his state of mind. Men seldom confide their infatuations to other men, but they often do to women, or, if they drop a hint, woman corkscrews the whole story out of them; and these two astute friends of his got Nigel’s the day he asked them to call and “be nice to Mrs. France.” They were still too young to approve of irregular love affairs, but with the optimism of their years were sure it could be arranged somehow, and called at once in Tilney Street.

Mrs. Winstone, delighted to add two young women, so much the fashion, to her set, cultivated them assiduously, confided to them the appalling ignorance of her niece, asked their assistance, and even took them shopping when Julia began to show signs of rebellion and fatigue.

At first they were merely amused; then they found the little West Indian pathetic, finally, like the Captain (alas! but such is life, dropped forever from this veracious chronicle) and young Herbert, began to revolve schemes for “saving her.”

Meanwhile the tired but happy and still unprophetic Julia was preparing for the ordeal of her first curtsy in Buckingham Palace.

V

MRS. WINSTONE won the admiration of her distinguished circle and the high approval of the duke for the tact with which she managed Julia’s destinies at this period. As the bride’s husband was away and she had neither entered society as a maid nor in company with her legal owner, her appearance at balls and formal dinners would have created a scandal. Nevertheless, she must be educated, and Mrs. Winstone cut the difference with her never failing acumen. Her own drawing-room was thronged with “the world” nearly every afternoon; she gave many small dinners to the smartest dissenters from middle-class morality that she knew; it was the era of the problem play, and Julia saw them all, as well as the “halls,” with their strange company in the lobbies; Nigel Herbert and one or two other admirers were encouraged; and the most modern and extreme of the psychological novels and plays littered the room above the mews.

But Julia, although some glimmerings of life’s realities were beginning to penetrate the serene unconsciousness of childhood (enough to induce in her a certain reserve of speech), was far too rushed and bewildered to comprehend more than one-hundredth part of what she heard and saw—the novels and plays she was too tired in her few solitary moments to open. Shopping, fitting, luncheons, dinners, the afternoon gatherings, the theatre, the constant buzz of conversation about politics and scandal, kept the surface of her mind agitated and left the depths untouched. Even Nigel, in spite of his ardent eyes and tender notes, she barely separated from Bridgit and Ishbel, merely conscious that she liked the three better than any one on earth except her mother. If she thought of France at all, it was to experience a sensation of momentary gratitude to the person that had given her this brilliant experience; although, after she began to rehearse daily for the presentation, curtsying before a row of dummies until she ached, backing out with her train over her arm, the correct smile on her face, the correct measure of respect and dignity in her mien, she was disposed to wish herself back on Nevis.

Had it not been for the immense respectability of the duke, and his personal friendship with his sovereign, the application to present the wife of Harold France at the court of St. James might have received scant consideration. He was even under the ban of the royal arbiter eligantiarum. But there was no question of refusing the pointed request of the duke, whom the queen regarded as a model of all the virtues in a degenerate age; and Mrs. Edis was also remembered with favor. The Lady Arabella Torrence, a sister of the duke, was selected to present the bride, and at six o’clock on a raw May morning Julia was aroused by the hair-dresser, and, after an hour’s torture, went to sleep again on a chair with her feathered head swathed in tulle.

The respite was brief. At nine o’clock two women from the great dressmaking establishment patronized by Mrs. Winstone came to array the victim in a train that filled up the entire room.

A cup of strong coffee revived Julia’s flagging spirits and vitality, and she fancied herself mightily when, draped, and sewn, and squeezed, and pinched, she was free at last to admire her reflection in the long mirror. Her gown was pure white, of course, the front of the round skirt covered with tulle and sown with seed pearls, the train of a stiff thick brocade, which would be sent on the morrow to be made into an evening wrap, just as the round frock was to do duty for her first party. Such was the private economy of the presentation costume. The duke had lent her the family pearls, and they depended to her waist and clasped her head. Her skin was as white as her gown and her hair and lips were vivid touches of color. Julia smiled at her reflection, then trembled as she gathered up the train, so much more alarming than the “property” stuff she had used at rehearsals.

Word had come that Lady Arabella was waiting, and cheered by compliments from her aunt and from Bridgit and Ishbel, who rushed in for a moment, she descended to the family coach and sat herself beside her formidable relative.

Lady Arabella was a tall bony big woman, with the large hands and feet which are supposed to be the prerogative of the plebeian, an early Victorian coiffure, and an imposing skeleton religiously exhibited so far as decency permitted and fashion expected, whenever a court function demanded this sacrifice on the part of a loyal subject who suffered from chronic hay fever. She had a deep bass voice, a bristling beard, and approved of nothing modern. “When the queen was young and gave the tone to Society” was a phrase constantly on her lips. She had felt it incumbent upon herself to give the distracted Julia a series of lectures on deportment, particularly on her behavior during the sacred hour of presentation, and had improved the opportunity to let fall many edifying remarks upon the duties of a wife, the shocking manner in which the women of the present generation neglected their husbands. Although she disapproved of her nephew in so far as she understood him, she subtly conveyed to his wife that to be the choice of the future head of the house of France was an overpowering honor.

At first she had terrified Julia, then bored her, finally, as the great day approached, loomed as a rock of strength. Nothing, at least, could frighten _her_, and she was so big and so conspicuously hideous that it was conceivably possible to shrink behind her.

But there was a preliminary ordeal of which she had heard nothing, a grateful callousing of the nerves before making a bow to a mere sovereign.

Many had waited for the last drawing-room because it would be the smartest, others because it was a bore, to be deferred as long as possible; many had been in Italy or on the Riviera; others had been put on the list by a power higher than their own wills. From whatever combination of causes the procession of slowly moving carriages was as long as the tail of a comet, and at times, particularly while the gorgeous coaches of the ambassadors were driving smartly down the Mall, came to a dead halt. It was then that the sovereign people had their innings.

They lined the streets surrounding the Palace in serried ranks. Not even the American crowd loves a “show” as the British does, Socialists and all. Their ancestors have gaped at gilded coaches and gorgeous robes and sparkling jewels for centuries, and if the day ever comes when they shall have exchanged these amiable pageants of their betters for a full stomach, who shall dare predict that they will be entirely satisfied?

What awe they may have inherited had long since disappeared. They crowded up against the procession of carriages, devouring with their curious good-natured eyes the splendid gowns and jewels, the glimpses of bare shoulders, and the beauty or bones of women apparently insensible of their existence.

For a time Julia clutched nervously at the pearls beneath her cloak, and shrank from that sea of eyes under hats of an indescribable commonness.

“My eye, ain’t her hair red!” exclaimed one young woman, with unmistakable reference. “And a little paint wouldn’t ’urt her.”

“Paint? That there’s high-toned pallor—”

“Pearl powder—”

“Oh, I sy, wot for do they let bibies like that marry when they don’t have to? I call it a shime.”

“Right you are!”

One girl, with a violent color and black frizzled hair that stood out quite eight inches from three parts of her face, thrust her head through the open window of the coach.

“Don’t you mind wot they sy,” she said consolingly. “They’re that nonsensical they can’t ’elp chaffing. And you’re the prettiest and the most haristocratic of the whole lot—I’ve been all up and down the line. And it ain’t powder! My word, but your complexion’s _grand_!”

She withdrew without waiting for an answer. Julia turned to Lady Arabella, who, throughout the ordeal, had sat as upright as if corseted in iron, and with her long haughty profile turned unflinchingly to the mob. So, it must be conceded, stupid as she was in her pride, would she have sat if they had threatened her life. As Julia asked her timidly (in effect) if the most aristocratic function of the year was always treated like a travelling circus, Lady Arabella answered, without flickering an eyelash: “Always, and fortunately for us. The lower classes love to see us on parade, and the more we give them of this sort of thing, the longer we shall keep their loyalty. Moreover, it serves the purpose—this drawing-room procession, in particular—of bringing us in close touch with the people, serves to demonstrate that we are real mortals, not the ridiculous creatures in the sort of novels they read. I always endeavor to look a symbol. I hope you will learn to do the same in time, for the lower classes are secretly proud of us and like us to play our part. You are drooping. Sit up and present your profile.”

“What’s the use of a profile without a backbone?” said Julia, wearily. “I’m so tired.”

“You must rise above mere physical fatigue,” said the old dame, severely. “People in our class keep our backbones for our bedrooms. When you are inclined to complain, think of the poor royalties, who stand for hours. And don’t finger your pearls. You are supposed to have been born with them about your neck.”

Julia’s sense of humor was not yet fully awake, but her new relative’s words were tonic as well as reassuring; she sat erect, but turned her eyes round her profile to regard this strange lower class of London, of which she had heard much but seen nothing until to-day. They were an ugly lot; beauty would seem to be the prerogative of aristocracy in England, possibly because it is well fed; they wore rough ready-made frocks, or, where finery was attempted, feathers and ribbons inferior to anything Julia had ever seen on the negroes of Nevis; and many of the hats looked as if they might be used as nightcaps to protect the elaborate masses of frizzled hair. Julia, brought up on the soundest aristocratic principles, saw in this gaping good-natured crowd but a broad and solid foundation for the historic institution above.

The coach finally rolled through the gates of Buckingham Palace. For an hour longer she stood, her slippers pinching until her native independence of character almost induced her to kick them off. But she was so tired after a month of London, an almost sleepless night, and the excitements of an already long day, that her brain worked toward no such simple solution, and before her moment came she ached from head to foot. The scene became a blur of vast rooms, of tall women, very thin or very fat, with diamond tiaras above set faces, and trains of every color over their arms, of girls that shifted from one foot to the other and breathed audibly their wish that it were over. One by one they disappeared. There was a sharp emphatic whisper from Lady Arabella. Julia started and set her teeth. “Mind you don’t sit down like that daughter of the American ambassador,” whispered the same fierce nervous voice. “Remember all that you have rehearsed.”

Julia, terrified to her marrow, did as opera singers do in moments of distress; she “fell back on technique.” Afterward she remembered vaguely making a succession of curtsies to a long row of dazzling crowns, but no effort of memory ever recalled the features beneath. She received the train flung over her arm and backed out without disgracing herself, but also without a thrill of that joy which a loyal subject is supposed to feel when in the presence of his sovereign for the first time.

“Not bad,” said Lady Arabella, graciously, as after many more moments, they entered their carriage. But Julia was yawning. When she reached the house in Tilney Street, she went to bed and refused to get up for twenty-four hours.

VI

ON the day following the drawing-room a prearranged conference was held in the “palatial home” of Mr. Jones in Park Lane. It was the hideous and abandoned house of a South African millionnaire, this home, but Lady Ishbel had refurnished it by degrees, and her boudoir in particular, with its pale French silks and many flowers, its Empire furniture, both delicately wrought and solid, framed appropriately a soft aristocratic loveliness that almost concealed strong bones and firm lines. As she is to play so intimate a part in the development of our heroine, she may as well be described here as later. She had quantities of curly silky chestnut hair, long brown eyes with fine fringes and an expression both modest and piquant, a straight little nose with arching nostril, a gracefully cut mouth with pink lips, and a square little chin with a dimple in it. Her figure was womanly, not too thin, and her capable hands were seldom idle. Just now she was retrimming a hat that had arrived the day before from the milliner of the moment in Paris. It may be added that her smile was the sweetest in London; and her voice was always rich and deep, with a natural vibration quite at the command of her will. Charm radiated from her, and she was an outrageous flirt. In fact she looked with suspicion upon women that did not flirt, estimating them below the normal and not to be trusted in anything. Men adored her, even when she laughed at them, which she often did in the most distracting manner imaginable.

Mrs. Herbert was standing in her favorite attitude behind a low fire-screen, her black eyes flashing, her nostrils dilating, while her young brother-in-law paced excitedly up and down the room. He was thinner than when he had fallen in love a month since, almost pallid, and his eyes had a strained look. There was no possible doubt as to what was the matter with him.

“Don’t be an ass,” said Mrs. Herbert. “You are acting like the hero of a melodrama—”

“I tell you something must be done!” cried the young man. “The squadron has been sighted off the Azores—”

“Well, what are you going to do about it? She’s not in love with you—doesn’t care a rap—”

“What chance have I had to make her? I never see her alone, never get a chance to talk to her for half an hour at a time. You promised to help me—”

“Mrs. Winstone has never let the poor thing go for a minute. She’s overdone the business. Julia’s had no time to think, goes to sleep at problem plays, and knows no more than when she arrived—”

“If I only had the chance to teach her!” cried Herbert, with flashing eyes.

“Look at here,” said his sister-in-law, grasping a point of the screen with either hand; “let us have this out. If your brains are not addled, they must have conceived some sort of a plan. What is it? A liaison? An elopement? I approve of neither. I’d like to save the poor child from that man, but the frying pan’s as good as the fire—”

“No liaison! I’d elope with her to-morrow if she’d go with me—”

“And disgrace a great family!” said Ishbel, softly.

“Oh, hang the family,” cried Mrs. Herbert, whose mother’s blood was already working in her. “The duke’s an old pudding. Lady Arabella and her sisters are cracked old sign-posts; and a scandal would serve Mrs. Winstone right for not packing the child back on the next steamer to her sister with the whole unvarnished truth in a letter. Not she, however; she wants to be aunt to a duchess. What I’m thinking of is Julia. The conceit of man! What do you suppose you could give her in exchange for disgrace—”

“Love!” cried Nigel. “I tell you it can make up for anything when it is strong enough.”

“Yes, when it is,” said Mrs. Herbert, who, recovering from her own infatuation for a brainless beauty, was not in a romantic frame of mind. “But she doesn’t love you, in the first place, and in the second, no woman can live her life on love, any more than a man can. She wants children, position of some sort, the society of other women—that last is one of woman’s biggest wants, and no man ever realizes it.”

“But love must be a wonderful thing,” said Ishbel, who had never experienced it. “It would almost be worth any sacrifice, especially if one had had things first, only men are always so funny in one way or another; one becomes disenchanted just in the nick of time.”

“No man lives who can make up to a woman for the loss of everything else,” said Mrs. Herbert, decidedly. “I mean a woman with brains, and Julia has them. She doesn’t know it because she doesn’t know anything; but one day—”

“Oh, if I could be the one to train that mind—why not? Why not?”

“Let’s come down to business. I refuse to help you either to elope or to make love to her. I fancy you’ll have to wait until France drinks himself to death, or this country passes rational divorce laws. Forget yourself and think of her.”

“Very well. Save her first. That is the main thing. I’ll never give her up, but I’m willing to forget myself for a bit, if I can—”

“Well, make one practical suggestion.”

Ishbel put the hat aside and clasped her hands. “I have long since made up my mind to offer her shelter when she needs it,” she announced. “Mrs. Winstone won’t, and Julia is sure to leave him.”

“She must never go to him!” Herbert stormed up and down the room again.

“Perhaps he’s not as bad as he’s painted,” said Ishbel, who was always charitable.

“Oh, you don’t know! You don’t know!”

“I do,” said the uncompromising Mrs. Herbert. “He’s a bad lot without the usual redeeming weakness of that easy form of good nature known as a kind heart; a sensualist without an atom of real warmth; a card sharp too clever to be caught; a periodical drinker; a vile gross creature whom only the lowest women have tolerated for years, but so blasé he is tired of them—”

“We must tell her things!” cried Ishbel. “We must make her understand!”

“You couldn’t make that baby understand anything. Besides, when it came to the point, you couldn’t do it. It’s all very well to talk of enlightening girls about anything, but personally I’ve never encountered any one that had the nerve to do it. Girls in our class absorb knowledge as they grow up; instincts help; but who ever told us anything? Well, here is my plan, since you two appear to have none. We shall tell her that France is dangerous, that when he drinks he is quite mad and may kill her. She’s game, but there are certain female fears that always can be worked on. And repugnances. We will draw horrid pictures of what he looks like when he’s drunk—”

“Right you are!” cried Herbert. “No decent girl will elect to live with a common drunkard, particularly when she doesn’t love him. And if Mrs. Winstone can’t be brought round, one of you will take her in?”

“If she’ll come. Perhaps she would wish to go back to her mother. She hasn’t a penny of her own, and apparently has never heard of the self-supporting woman. But it might be managed somehow.”

“It must!” cried Ishbel. “We will hide her alternately.”

“But to what end? France might be exasperated to the point of wishing to rid himself of her, but what ground for divorce? We travel in a circle as far as Nigel is concerned.”

“I have it!” cried Nigel, whose fine imagination was fired by the most stimulative of all passions. “Give me the chance to make her love me, and then take her to America and get a divorce there. Thank heaven I have a little something of my own, and I can earn more. We’ll stay in America until the storm blows over—”

“American divorces are not legal in England—”

“Then I’ll stay there forever. Promise. Promise.”

“Not bad,” said Mrs. Herbert. “You take her in, Ishbel, and I’ll take her over. Mr. Jones would probably not consent to your desertion—a divorce must take time, even in the United States, and you have another sister to marry off next season—”

“Of course I’ll take her in, and we’ll begin to-morrow to frighten her.”

Nigel kissed them both.

But Fortune is often with the wicked. On the following morning wires flashed the news that Harold France, first lieutenant of her Majesty’s cruiser _Drake_, now on its way home from South America, was down with typhoid fever. Nobody save the duke expected a man of France’s habits to recover from any microbous assault, but that innocent and loyal relative gave immediate orders to convert several rooms of his town house into a hospital, engaged a staff of doctors and nurses, and peremptorily ordered Julia to move over and be ready to take her place at her husband’s bedside.

VII

THE four months that followed were by no means the unhappiest of Julia’s life, much as she resented being torn from her friends and the bewildering delights of London. The duke, a noble if inconspicuous pillar of the good old school, stood out for wifely duty in appearance if not in fact: the nurses barely permitted Julia to cross the threshold of the sick-chamber. But although she was of no possible use, and time hung heavy on her hands, none of her friends was permitted to call on her, and the duke himself took her for a constitutional at eight in the morning and nine in the evening. Julia’s complete indifference to her husband had caused him grave uneasiness, even before the stricken bridegroom’s return, and he embraced this opportunity to keep the child under his personal surveillance and do what he could to give a serious turn to a “female brain of eighteen.”

Julia, prompted by Ishbel, asked to have a telephone put in her room, but the request was courteously refused, and the two loyal friends were forced to content themselves with frequent notes. After Goodwood, Bridgit went to Yorkshire and Ishbel to Homburg, but Nigel remained in town, although all three were cheerfully persuaded that France would die and life be happy ever after. Nigel regained his fresh good looks and spirits, endured the hot deserted city without a murmur, and although he naturally refrained from writing to the coveted wife of a dying man, felt a certain exaltation in watching over her from afar. It was during this period that he conceived the idea of writing a novel of the slums (the unknown appealing to his adventurous imagination), and took long rambles in unsavory precincts that were productive of more results than one.

Meanwhile Julia, brought up in submission to a far stronger will than the duke’s, had ceased to rebel, and taken to heart the parting admonition of her aunt (that lady had gone with Mrs. Macmanus to Marienbad to renew her complexion) to learn all the duke was willing to teach her, and to read the novels that celebrated London society, past and present. Mrs. Winstone, too, believed that France must die, but, perceiving that her niece had a charm of her own in addition to the magnetism of youth, had another match in mind for her.

So Julia drank in the long discourses upon the abominable Gladstone and all his policies, the iniquity of the Harcourt Budget, obediently rejoiced at the failure of the second Home Rule Bill, became intimately acquainted with the other notable figures in British politics: Lord Salisbury (the duke’s idol), Lord Rosebery (the present Prime Minister), fated, in the duke’s not always erring judgment, to follow close upon the heels of Gladstone into political seclusion, Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Campbell-Bannerman, Sir William Vernon Harcourt, Mr. Balfour, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, George Curzon, Lord Lansdowne, Mr. Goschen (the speaker), the Duke of Devonshire (Hartington), Mr. Morley, and Mr. Bryce. The treaty with Japan was a fruitful subject of discourse; and when the war broke out between that new military power and China, Julia, who was growing nervous, gratified the duke by sharing his excitement. In her lonely hours she read promiscuously and thought a good deal.

She rarely flung a thought to poor Nigel, for when the big helpless form of her husband had been taken from the ambulance and carried past her up the broad stairs, the natural tenderness and pity in her nature had stirred, and something of what she felt for little Fanny had gone out to him. She would have nursed him, had she been permitted; she inquired for him many times a day, and sincerely hoped that he would recover. She had not the faintest notion of loving him, but she would be a good wife, and, no doubt, be happy. Ishbel did not love her husband and was happy, and so, apparently, were a good many more that flitted through her aunt’s drawing-room with a temporary admirer in tow. Julia’s future plans included no infants-in-waiting; she should become one of those great political women the planets, according to her mother’s letters, had ordered her to be; how could she doubt this destiny when every circumstance was conspiring to fulfil it? So, between the sense of an inexorable fate, the serious atmosphere of her new surroundings, and the desperate struggle of her husband for his life, her mind flowered rapidly; and the duke was delighted with her. He disliked and distrusted women that stood alone, that won personal fame for themselves, even “beauties” whose notoriety threw their lords into the background; but he had a very keen appreciation of their usefulness to man, not only as dams, but as tactful distributors of political smiles. Of course there must be a certain amount of brain behind the smiles, that they occur at precisely the right moment; but any man, given fair material to work on, could do well with it and prevent mistakes. He knew that certain women in history had been the centre of famous political salons, but took for granted that they had been severely coached by men. As for the women that were famous in the arts of fiction and painting, he did not know how to account for them, therefore refused to think about them at all. Julia he regarded as a promising specimen. She was healthy, and would no doubt replenish the almost exhausted house of France; she was pretty and charming, therefore would keep her husband out of mischief; and, taking to politics as a duck takes to water, would be sure to smile, subtly, radiantly, or meditatively, as well as to listen intelligently, when the distinguished members of his party that he purposed to entertain once more were obliged to talk to her.

On the twenty-first day of France’s illness his temperature went down, he slept naturally, and upon awaking asked to see his wife. Julia was admitted, and stood for a few moments by the bed, stammering congratulations and staring at the shrunken face with its ragged beard; then went to her own room and wept stormily over the wreck of what at least had been the perfection of manly strength. France’s temperature remained normal for a fortnight, then suddenly shot up again, and twice, during the ensuing twenty days, he almost expired. Two doctors slept in the house when the relapse was at its worst, and the political talks were interrupted, although the duke never for a moment believed that the last of his race would die.

By this time the press was interested, for at all events France was heir-presumptive to a great estate and title, and daily bulletins were published. Nigel began his novel in order to divert his mind from indecent jubilation; but when France’s temperature dropped again and he improved from day to day with uncompromising persistence, his rival took the express to Yorkshire to confer with Bridgit. She could give him no encouragement. Julia in her letters had betrayed something of her state of grace, and during the relapse had written once in a strain that manifested the deepest anxiety.

“He’ll get her through her sympathy, pity; no matter what she may be in the future, she’s all female at present,” remarked Mrs. Herbert, after showing these letters to Nigel. “All women have to go through the female stage, one way or another; and now will come a long convalescence during which she will be sorrier for him than ever—big man helpless, and all the rest of it. What is worse, she will become accustomed to him. Better give her up, my boy, or wait until she runs away from him. She’s sure to, sooner or later,—unless he reforms. After all, why shouldn’t he? A serious illness often works wonders; gives one so much time to think. And physical weakness always induces such virtuous resolutions. France may look back upon his past life with horror. Then, where will you be? Julia’s a well-born well-brought-up girl of high ideals. If France treats her decently she’ll stick to him, as many another woman is sticking to a husband that is all that she doesn’t want him to be—”

“The more shame to them!” cried Nigel, hotly.

“Well, there are worse things than conventions and standards. Now run off and write your novel. I am told that a harrowed mind often produces the most moving fiction.”

“I’ll wait, but not too long,” said Nigel, doggedly. “Bosquith is being got ready for them, and is only twelve miles from here. You must ask me down, and I’ll manage to see her as soon as it’s decent. Of course I can’t cut under a man while he’s being trundled round in a bath chair.”

VIII

FRANCE’S convalescence was very slow. His superb physique had fought death victoriously, as, so far, it had saved him from the consequences of dissipation, but only youth could have given him a swift recovery. It was September before he was able to move to Bosquith. After the stifling London summer, Julia needed a change as much as he did. The duke, as soon as his heir was able to sit up, had taken a run over to Kissengen, but Julia had spent the greater part of every day in the sick-room, reading the sporting papers and light novels to her husband, or amusing him as best she could. France would barely let her out of his sight. His shrewd cunning brain recovered its strength while his body was still helpless, and he conceived that now was his opportunity to make this inexperienced child believe in a romantic devotion, and to win her love in return. He permitted her to take a daily walk or drive with one of the nurses, making much of his sacrifice, and was so touchingly happy to see her after these brief separations that Julia almost wept, and gave him her hand to hold, while she made the most of every trifle her observing eyes had taken note of during her respite.

He no longer repelled her; not only did his helplessness appeal to her deep womanly instincts, but she was become so accustomed to his touch that she was quite indifferent to it: she bathed his head with cologne several times a day, kissed him obediently when she came and went, and even gave him her shoulder as a pillow when he fretfully declared that his head could rest on nothing else. It was a young and excessively thin shoulder, and, as a matter of fact, France would have preferred feathers, but the profoundly calculating mind, even when the body is weak, disdains trifles.

As soon as he was pronounced well enough to travel, the wary duke returned and accompanied his charges to Bosquith. This great estate, some fifteen thousand acres, which included moors and grouse, as well as many farms with turnip fields, was the duke’s favorite property, not only because of the shootings, but because the air of the North Sea was the best tonic he knew. It was for this reason that he had chosen Bosquith for the last stage of his nephew’s convalescence, rather than one of his country houses nearer to London. But he had hesitated, nevertheless. Bosquith adjoined the Yorkshire estate of Bridgit Herbert’s paternal grandfather, and he knew of his new relative’s affection for a young woman of whom he had never approved since he had seen her riding astride over the moors with her brothers, pretending to be an American Indian. He had seen her occasionally since her marriage, and, no mean student of physiognomy, had labelled her dangerous, one of those women that set their nonsensical opinions above man’s and call themselves advanced. He had no intention that the intimacy should continue, nor that Julia should see aught of Nigel Herbert, whose devotion she had artlessly revealed. As for Ishbel, who visited Bridgit every year, he would not have her in the house, as he could not admit her and shut the door in her husband’s face. Somebody must take a stand, and the duke, although he might not be able to impose himself on his generation, was not only intensely loyal to his class but alive to its dangers. No snob, Julia’s lack of title and fortune did not annoy him in the least. “No one can be more than gentleman or lady,” he was wont to say magnanimously, “and I have known more than one titled bounder of historic descent. But when it comes to the James William Joneses, well, thank heaven! at least they don’t belong to us, and we are not bound to countenance them for the sake of their fathers; we cannot drag them up, and they will end by pulling us down; in other words they will vulgarize the British aristocracy until the masses lose their pride in us; and then where will we be? Democracy, Socialism, threaten us as it is. Our middle and lower classes at home, and our too independent colonies afar, must be made to retain their loyalty, at all costs.”

Julia thought these sentiments sound, but made up her mind privately that she would never drop Ishbel or Bridgit, although she had been given to understand that the duke deeply regretted the proximity of Bosquith to the happy hunting grounds of Mrs. Herbert, and would not permit her to visit them. Her rapidly awakening intellect was seeking for partnership in her still fluid character, and although books could not develop the last, inheritances from a line of men, and at least one woman, who had always thought and acted for themselves, however mistakenly, were stirring. She had been too managed and surrounded to find herself as yet, but she had begun to suspect that the ego has a life of its own and certain inalienable rights.

The journey north sent France to bed again for three days, and for a fortnight he was wheeled about the park; then he began to hobble feebly, first on the arm of his nurse or wife, then with the aid of a stick. Julia accepted him as one of the facts of existence, regarded him proprietorally, took an immense interest in his progress toward recovery, and forgot him when she could in the library or in long walks over the moors. The castle was romantically situated on a cliff overhanging the North Sea, and in appearance, as in surroundings, was all that Julia could ask. It was very brown, two-thirds of it was in ruins, and the other third included a feudal hall, two towers, and walls four feet thick. The windows, however, had been enlarged, hot-water pipes had been put in, and no modern house was more sanitary. The duke, despite a pardonable pride in his ancestry, and an unmitigated conservatism in politics, was strictly up to date where his health and comfort were concerned. Born an invalid, he had lived longer than many of his burly ancestors, owing to a thin temperament and an early and avid interest in hygiene.

He had a second reason for bringing Harold to Bosquith. The neighboring borough was much under his influence, and he proposed that his relative should stand for it at the next general election. At the last it had succumbed to the personal manipulation of Gladstone, who had taken a lively pleasure in routing the duke; but it was conservative by habit, and not a measure of either Gladstone’s government or that of his successor had met with its approval. It was in just the frame of mind to be nursed by a genial and tactful duke. France fell in with these plans, and, when able to meet the local leaders, laid aside his almost unbearable haughtiness of manner, and assumed a bluff sailorlike heartiness which impressed them deeply.

Julia quickly revived in the bracing air of sea and moor, and as France rose late and retired early, besides sleeping a good deal during the day, and as she had acquired a certain skill in dodging the duke,—who, moreover, took his local duties very seriously,—she felt happy and free once more. The library was well furnished, the moors were purple, her bedroom was in an ancient tower, and the sea boomed under her window. She wrote long letters to her grimly triumphant mother, and, now and again, to Bridgit and Ishbel. The former, accompanied by her husband and Nigel, rode over to see her, but she was obliged to receive them in the chilling presence of her husband and the duke, and when the brief visit came to an end, was put on her honor not to leave the estate.

“As soon as Harold is quite recovered,” said the duke, “we will both drive over with you, for I am far from counselling you to be rude to any one. Only, while your husband is ill, it would be highly indecorous for you to be associating with young people; and for the matter of that, the more mature minds with which you associate during the next few years, the better—for us all, my dear, for us all.”

But Julia, at this period, was quite independent of people. Her newly awakened intellect was clamoring for books and more books. Politics, the planets, the “brilliant future,” friends, were alike forgotten. Nothing mattered but the lore that scholars and worldlings had gathered, that ravening maw in her mind. Perhaps this early ingenuous stage of the mind’s development is its happiest; it is uncritical, having no standards of life and personal research for comparison, it swamps the real ego, while mightily tickling the false, it obliterates mere life, no matter how unsatisfactory, and above all it is saturated with the essence of novelty, the subtlest spring of all passion. Julia, barely educated, found in histories, biographies, memoirs, travels, even in works of science beyond her full comprehension, a wonderland of which she had never dreamed, much as she had longed for books on Nevis. That had been merely a case of inherited brain cells calling for furniture; embarked upon her adventure, these cells were crammed so rapidly that her ancestors slept in peace, and Julia felt herself an isolated and completely happy intellect.

Nevertheless, she was young.

One night, shortly after her husband, now able to grace the evening board, had gone to his room, and the duke was closeted with the conservative agent, she went to her own room, opened the window, and hung out over the sea. The moon, whose malicious alertness Captain Dundas had deplored, was at the full and flooded a scene as beautiful in its way as the tropics. The great expanse of water was almost still, and a broad path of silver seemed firm enough to walk on straight away to the continent of Europe and its untasted delights. Just round the corner was the rose garden, which covered the filled-in moat on the south side of the castle and several hundred yards beyond. The roses were not very good ones, being somewhat rusted by the salt-sea spray, but, like the pleasaunce on another side of the castle, were a part of the more modern traditions of Bosquith; and the duke, although entirely indifferent to Nature when she ceased to be useful and amused herself with being merely beautiful, was a stickler for tradition; the roses were never neglected without, although never brought within; pollen inflamed his mucous membranes.

The blossoms had gone with the summer, but Julia was fancying herself inhaling their perfumes when she became aware that the figure of a man had detached itself from the tangle. She watched him idly, supposing him to be one of the grooms, and wondering if his sweetheart would follow. But the man was alone, and in a moment he bent down, picked up a handful of loose stones, and leaned back as if to fling them upward from the narrow ledge. Simultaneously Julia and Nigel Herbert recognized each other.

“What—what—do you want?” gasped Julia, in a loud whisper.

“You,” said Nigel, grimly. “Come down here.”

“Impossible!” thrilling wildly, however.

“If you don’t, I’ll break in. I’ve prowled round here for three nights, and know the place by heart. The leads—”

“For heaven’s sake, go away!”

“Will you come down? I’m spraining the back of my neck, and may slip off this narrow shelf any minute. Do you want to see my mangled remains at the foot of the cliff?”

“No. No. But—”

“Come down. I must have a talk with you—have this thing out or go mad. It’s little to ask!”

Julia glanced behind her at the circular room hung with arras (to keep out draughts and conceal the hot-water pipes), and furnished with a big Gothic bed and hard upright chairs—and thrilled again. She was not the least in love with Nigel, but she suddenly realized that she was nearly nineteen and romance had never entered her life. After all, was love a necessary factor? Might not the romantic adventure be something to remember always, particularly when assisting a most unromantic husband achieve a political career, and entertaining some of the dullest men in London? She hesitated but an instant, then leaned out again.

“I’ll try,” she whispered.

“If you fail, I’ll come to-morrow night.”

“Very well, go into the rose garden—under the oak.”

She put on a dark cape and opened her door cautiously. The long corridor was lighted by a small lamp: gas and electricity, not being hygienic essentials, were not among the Bosquith improvements. All the bedrooms opened upon this corridor, but Julia knew that her husband slept, his capacity for instant and prolonged slumber being one of his assets. She crept past the duke’s door. He was an early bird, but was in the library still, no doubt, and the library was far away. He would be sure to mount by the small stair beside it; the grand staircase led to the unused drawing-rooms, and into the immense hall, which, at this season with no guests in the castle, and a library answering every requirement of the family, was economically inexpedient. When a hereditary duke has several entailed estates to keep up besides a town house, and a paltry income of forty thousand pounds a year, he is put to shifts of which the envious world knows nothing.

Down the grand staircase, therefore, stole Julia. It creaked even under her small feet; behind the wainscot she heard gnawing sounds of hideous import; and the darkness below was unrelieved by a single silver gleam. But Julia possessed a valiant soul; moreover, was determined to have her adventure. She felt her way past the massive pieces of furniture toward a small door in the tower room beneath her own; she dared not attempt to unchain and open the great front doors studded with nails. She had used this humble means of exit before, and although the room was full of rubbish, she found the big rusty key without difficulty, opened the door, then with another fearful glance about her stole toward the middle of the rose garden. The old bushes were very high and ragged, but had it not been for an oak tree in their midst, concealment for a man nearly six feet high would have been impossible. Julia made her way straight toward the tree, and uttered a loud “Shhh—” when Nigel impetuously left its shelter.

“And even this is not safe,” she whispered, as they met. “We are too near the castle, and the duke always takes a little walk before he goes to bed. Follow me and don’t speak or make any noise.”

She led the way out of the rose garden and across the park to a grove of ancient oaks. A brook wandered among the trees. The moonlight poured in. The dark frowning mass of the castle was plain to be seen. The sea murmured. A nightingale sang. No spot on earth could have been more romantic. Julia shivered with delight, and thanked the winking stars.

But Nigel was insensible to the romance of his surroundings. Unlike the woman, he wanted the main factor; the setting could take care of itself. And he was in a distracted and desperate frame of mind. As Julia turned to him she experienced her first misgiving; his face was set and very white.

“This is where I often read and dream,” she said conversationally. “It is my favorite spot.”

“Is it? It’s awfully good of you to come out. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. I might have written, I suppose; but I can only write fiction. Couldn’t put down a word of what I wanted to say to you—of what I felt—” He broke off and added passionately, “Julia! Don’t you care for me—the least bit?”

“No.” Julia, not having the faintest idea how to handle such a situation, took refuge in the bare truth, at all times more natural to her than to most women. “I don’t love you, but I think it rather nice to meet you like this for once.”

Nigel groaned. Like all born artists, he understood something of women by instinct, and felt more hopeless in the face of this uncompromising honesty and artlessness than when alone with his imagination.

“But you don’t love your husband?”

“Oh, no. Not the way you mean, at least. I’ve read a lot about love these last months, and it must be wonderful. I’ve grown quite fond of poor Harold, but I never could love him in that way. I wish I could,” she added, with a sudden sense of loyalty to the absent and sleeping husband.

“Julia, you must try to understand! You never can even tolerate that man. You mustn’t live with him. We were plotting to save you from him when he fell ill, and then we ho—we thought he’d die. But he’s, he’s—Oh, please don’t look at me as if I were a cad. I know you are a brick, and I’ve held out until he was on his legs again—and I nearly off my head. I won’t say a word against him. Let it go at this—you never can love him. That I can swear to and _you know it_. But you could love some one, and it must, it must be me! It shall be! Julia, if you could only _guess_ what love means, then you might have some idea, at least, of how I love you. But even your instincts don’t seem to have awakened. And I haven’t the chance to teach you! You must give it to me! You must!”

“Do you want me to elope with you?” asked Julia, curiously. This was a highly interesting development, and after the manner of her sex, when indifferent, she grew cooler and more analytical as her lover’s flame mounted.

“No—no—not yet. I only wanted a chance to-night to tell you how I love you—to make you understand that much, if possible. Oh, God! It _must_ be communicable! When you are alone and think it over—I hope—I hope—Meanwhile, I want you to promise to make opportunities to meet me. I can’t go to the castle. But you can meet me. On the moor. Here at night. I have waited long enough. France no longer needs you. He is nearly well, and will get everything he wants—”

“He wants me more than anything else,” said Julia, shrewdly. “He’s as much in love with me as you are—”

“He shan’t have you!” shouted Nigel, and Julia stared, fascinated, at a face convulsed with passion. It was the first time she had seen this tremendous force unleashed, for France had done his courting under the eagle eye of his future mother-in-law, and Nigel, during their acquaintance in London, had not progressed outwardly beyond sentiment. Julia, even while deciding that sentiment became his fresh frank face better, and shrinking distastefully from a passion so close to her, was conscious of disappointment in her own unresponsiveness. Nineteen! What an ideal age for love! And what lover could fill all requirements more satisfactorily than Nigel? But she felt as cold as the moon. To her deep mortification she was obliged to stifle a yawn; it was long past her bedtime. She answered with such haste that her voice had an encouraging quiver in it.

“Oh, don’t let’s talk about him. It’s so jolly to see you again. Tell me about your book. Have you finished it?”

“I didn’t come here to talk about my book.” Nigel’s voice was rough. He came so close to her that she shrank once more, and turned away her eyes. “Oh, I’m not going to touch you. I couldn’t unless you wanted me to, unless you loved me— That is what I want: the chance to make you love me. Will you give it to me?”

“I—I don’t see how it is possible.” She longed to run, but her female instincts were budding under this tropical storm, and one prompted that if she ran, terrible things might happen. The most honest of women is dishonest in moments of danger pertaining to her sex. Julia felt danger in the air. She also rejected Nigel’s protestations. She buckled on her feminine armor and turned to him sweetly.

“I must think it over,” she said. “I never even dreamed that you were in love with me. I should never dare come out again at night. But perhaps on the moor, some morning—”

“I should prefer that. One of the keepers or servants might see us in the park, and I don’t wish our love to be vulgarized—”

“Oh! I hadn’t thought of that! How horrid! I’ll go back this minute. You stay here until I’ve had time to get inside. I’ll write to-morrow. If you follow me, I shall never believe that you love me—”

Even while she spoke she was flitting through the grove with every appearance of an alarm she did not feel at all. Nigel ran after her.

“I’ll not follow if you will swear to meet me to-morrow morning—on the cliffs three miles north from here.”

“Yes. Yes. I swear it.” And she fled into the broad moonlight beyond the trees, while Nigel flung himself on the turf and gnashed his teeth.

Julia, when she reached the upper corridor, almost ran into the duke, but he was near-sighted, used to mice, and she cowered behind an armored knight unsuspected. When she finally closed her own door behind her, she found that all inclination to sleep had fled and that she was more excited than while the immediate centre of a love storm. She sat by the window for hours, thinking hard, and feeling several years older. Quite honest once more, now that she was safe behind a locked door, she examined her new problem on every side. It was quite possible, she confessed, that if she had loved Nigel, even a bit, she might have consented to his program, for youth has its rights; she had not been consulted in her marriage, she was more or less a prisoner, with no prospect of even youthful companionship, and the idea of being a duchess did not interest her at all. Of the meaning of sin she had but the vaguest idea.

But of loyalty and honor she had a very distinct idea. Instinct and reason told her that she never would love Nigel; otherwise, with every provocation, she must have loved him long since. Therefore would it be unfair to play with him. She would far rather be married to him than to France, for he was young and clever and charming, but even were she free now, she would not marry him. Therefore was it her duty to dismiss and cure him as quickly as possible, not ruin his youth by keeping him dangling, after what she knew to be the habit of many women. Also, for the first time, she felt really drawn to her husband, so unconscious of her naughty adventure. After all, she was his, he adored her, and he deserved every reparation in her power. Who could tell?—she might love him. Love appeared to be in the nature of a mighty river at spring flood; no doubt it ingulfed everything in its way. She had leaped to one side to-night, but her husband—yes, it was conceivable that she might stand still and await the flood without making faces.

She felt extremely satisfied and virtuous as she lit her candle and wrote a kind but uncompromising letter to Nigel, taking back her promise to meet him on the morrow, and warning him that if he wrote to her she should give his letters to her husband. It was not in her to do anything of the sort, but she had the gift of a fine straightforward forcible style, and her letter so enraged Nigel that he left England as quickly as steam could take him, cursing her and all women.

So ended their first chapter.

IX

THE curtain had fallen on the first act of “La Traviata,” and Ishbel, for once alone in the box with her husband, glanced idly over the imposing tiers of Covent Garden. Royalty was present, the smart peeresses were out in full force and wore their usual brave display of tiaras and miscellaneous jewels, inherited and otherwise, so that the horseshoe glittered like Aladdin’s palace. There was also a jeweller’s window in the stalls, and altogether it was a representative night in the beginning of the season.

Nevertheless, Ishbel became suddenly and acutely aware that she had on more jewels than any woman in the house. Not only was there an all-round and almost unbearably heavy tiara on her small head, nearly a foot high and composed of diamonds and emeralds as large as plums, but she wore a rope of diamonds that reached far below her knees, a necklace of five rows of pearls as big as her husband’s thumb nails, and linked with emeralds and diamonds, a sunburst of diamonds that looked like a waterfall, and equally priceless gems cutting into the flesh of her tender shoulders where they clasped the only visible portion of her raiment. Ishbel was justly proud of her magnificent collection of jewels, but, being a young woman of unerring good taste, was in the habit of wearing a few at a time. Several hours earlier, however, her husband, grown jealous of the prosiliency of the New South African millionnaires, had come home with the rope and commanded her to put on every jewel she possessed for the opera that night, and the first great ball of the season to follow. As she had surveyed herself in her long mirror it had occurred to her that she looked like a begum, but when she had called her husband’s attention to the fact, and suggested some modification in her display of converted capital, he had replied curtly that he had spent a quarter of his fortune for the public to look at on her equally ornamental self, and that when he wished it displayed in toto, displayed it should be. That is the way for a man to talk to his wife when he means to be obeyed; and when the masterful and successful Mr. Jones delivered his ultimatums, few that had aught to do with him were so hardy as to continue the argument.

Ishbel had trained herself to take him humorously, to believe him the most generous of men because he had proved quite amenable to the family plan of marrying off her sisters (they were handsome and an additional excuse for entertaining), and because he never alluded to her enormous bills or forgot to hand her a check for pin-money every quarter. She had rewarded him with thanks couched in an endless variety of terms and glances, even caresses when he demanded them. When they were alone at table (as seldom as she could manage) she even coquetted with him, giving him the full play of her piquant eyes and sweet smile, and talking in her brightest manner, to conceal from himself how hopeless he was in conversation. She even pitied him sometimes; for, in spite of his riches, his interests in the City, and the great position in society that she had given him, he seemed to her a lonely being, and she would have loved him if she could.

To-night, however, his words had rankled. They had echoed during the drive to the opera-house, stirring her most amiable of minds to a vague anger; and now, quite suddenly, she was filled with an intense mortification and resentment. Every intelligent being that has made a signal mistake in his life’s order has some sudden moment of awakening, of vision. The phrase “kept wife” had not yet arrived in literature, but it rose in Ishbel’s mind as she glanced from her white slender body, weary in its glittering armor, to the big heavy man opposite, sitting with a hand on either knee, his hard bright little eyes surveying her with triumphant approval. She was his property; he owned her, as he owned his house in Park Lane, the castle he had recently bought from a peer terrified by the remodelling of the death duties, his princely equipages, the noisy jewels on her person. After all, she had not a penny of her own, was as poor as when she had been one of fourteen hopeless sisters in Ireland; for he had carefully abstained from settlements, that she might feel her dependence, thank him periodically for his splendid checks. Her father had been in no position to insist upon settlements, but, had he been, would she be any better off ethically than now? They would have been but another present from the man who had bought her as he had bought his other famous possessions. If she had children, they would be his, not hers, and there was nothing he could not compel her to do, and be upheld by the laws of his country, unless he both beat her and kept a mistress.

She suddenly loathed him. That she had given him value received made her loathe him, and herself, the more. She shrank until she expected to hear her jewels rattle together, then raised her eyes again and flashed them about the house. She picked out twenty women in that glance who had sold their beauty for what their jewels represented, although, for the most part, they had the saving grace to be owned by gentlemen. But were they so much better off? Jones, at least, was now inoffensive in his manners and speech. Many gentlemen she knew were not, and one duke had a habit of catching her by the arm and leering into her crimsoning ear a horrid story. But that was not the point. What was the point? That women who married men for jewels and not for love were no better than the women of the street? Most women would have stopped there. It is a sentimental form of reasoning, eminently satisfactory to many women, and to some male novelists. But Ishbel had been born with a clear logical brain in which the fatal gift of humor was seldom dormant, and of late this brain had shown symptoms of impatience at neglect, muttered vague demands for recognition. Youth, a natural love of gayety, pleasure, splendor, reigning as a beauty, a laudable desire to help one’s family,—all very well—but—

Ishbel’s inner vision pierced straight down to the root (ornamentally overlaid) of the whole matter. The portionless woman, whether there was love between herself and her husband or not, was a property, a subject, an annex, nothing more, not even if she bore him children. Indeed, in the latter case she but proved the old contention that in bearing children she fulfilled her only mission on earth.

Ishbel had heard, as one hears of all civilized activities, of Woman’s Suffrage; this, too, passed in review before that search-light in her mind, and she wondered if the women asking for it dared to do so unless economically independent. She and Bridgit, when resting on their labors two years before,—a breathing spell in the grouse season,—had amused themselves in the library tracing the course of woman during those periods of the world’s history when she had been famous for her innings; and both had been struck by the fact that when nations were at peace and man enjoyed prosperity and comparative leisure, woman’s eminence and apparent freedom had been but her lord’s opportunity to display his riches and gratify the non-military side of his vanity. Only in a small minority of cases had this eminence and freedom been the result of self-support, inherited wealth, genius, or dynastic authority: the vast majority had been toys, jewel-laden henchwomen; even the great courtesans had been dependent upon their youth and charm and the caprice of man.

* * * * *

No wonder so few women had left an impress on history. How could any brain, even if endowed with true genius, reach the highest order of development while the character remained flaccid in its willing dependence upon the reigning sex? And man had despised woman throughout the ages, even when most enslaved by her, knowing that on him depended her very existence. He had the physical strength to wring her neck, and the legal backing to treat her as partner or servant, whichever he found agreeable or convenient. She and Bridgit had discussed this phenomenon philosophically but impersonally, it being understood that when they did give their brains exercise, it should not interfere with their youthful enjoyment of life; nor should the exercise continue long enough to become a habit; time enough for that sort of thing when one had turned thirty. But it occurred to Ishbel in these moments of painful clarity. She had not taken the least interest in Woman’s Suffrage, a movement under a cloud at this time, but she had a sudden and poignant desire to be independent, and a simultaneous conviction that no woman was worthy of anything better than being one of man’s miscellaneous properties until she were. What right had women, supported by men, living on their exertions or fortunes, displayed or used at their pleasure, tricking them by a thousand ingenious devices to gain their ends, to be regarded as equals, political or otherwise? The most democratic of woman employers, unless a faddist, did not regard her employees, particularly her servants, as equals; and yet they, at least, worked for their bread, were economically independent, could throw up their situations without scandal. Ishbel had twenty-three servants in her ugly Park Lane mansion, and in the bitterness of her humiliation she felt herself the inferior of the scullery maid. She opened her eyes wide, staring out upon the world through the glittering curtain before her. What an extraordinary world it was! How silly! How uncivilized! How incomplete! What might not women attain with complete self-respect, and how utterly hopeless was their case without it!

“What are you thinking about?” asked Mr. Jones, curiously. He had been watching her for some moments.

“That I ache with all these ridiculous jewels.” Ishbel stood up and walked deliberately to the back of the box. “I feel as if I were wearing an old-fashioned crystal chandelier. Will you kindly put my cloak on?”

Jones had risen (being well trained in the small courtesies), but he showed no intention of following her.

“Certainly not,” he said peremptorily. “Sit down. I wish you to remain here until it is time to go to the duchess’s ball—”

“I’m not going to the duchess’s ball. I’m going home.”

He stared at her, his long straight mouth opening slightly, and his heavy underjaw twitching. Like many millionnaires, self-made, he looked like a retired prize-fighter, and for the moment he felt as old gods of the ring must feel when brushed contemptuously aside by arrogant youth. This was the first time his wife had shown the slightest hint of rebellion, deviated from a sweetness and tact that was without either condescension from her lofty birth, or servility to his wealth. But there was neither sweetness nor tact in her small pinched face. Her mouth was as compressed as his own could be, and the expression of her eyes frightened him.

“What on earth’s the matter with you?” he asked roughly.

“I tell you I don’t like the idea of looking like an idol, a chandelier, a begum, what you will; of having on more jewels than any woman in the house; of looking nouveau riche, if you will have it. And I am tired and am going home to bed. You can come or not, as you like.”

She put on her cloak. Jones, swearing under his breath, but helpless, caught up his own coat and hat and followed her out of the house. But although he stormed, protested, even condescended to beg, all the way home, she would not utter another word, and when she reached her room, locked the door behind her.

X

THE next morning she sought Bridgit, having ascertained by telephone that her friend was alone. The Hon. Mrs. Herbert, although “masculine” only in so far as Nature had endowed her with a strong positive mind and character, physical and mental courage, and a disdain of all pettiness (the hypothetical masculine ideal), thought boudoirs silly, and called her personal room in South Audley Street a den. Not that it in the least resembled a man’s den. It was a long and narrow room on the first floor at the back of the house, and furnished with deep chairs and sofas covered with flowered chintzes, and several good pieces of Sheraton. She was known for her fine collection of remarque etchings, and the best of them were in this room. The large table was set out with reviews and new books, which she bought on principle, although she found time for little more than a glance at their contents. Her cigarette-box was of elaborately chased silver. Good a sportswoman as she was, she was not in the least “sporty,” being too well balanced and well bred to assume a pose of any sort. She was a woman of the world with many tastes, who was destined to have a good many more.

When Ishbel entered, she was walking up and down, her hands clasped behind her, her heavy black brows drawn above the brooding darkness below. She, too, was in an unenviable frame of mind.

Her brows relaxed as she saw Ishbel. “What on earth is the matter?” she exclaimed.

Ishbel, who had not slept but was quite calm, sat down and told her story.

“I don’t suppose you quite understand how I feel,” she concluded; “for you have always had your own fortune, have never even been dependent on your father. But of one thing I am positive: if you found yourself in my position, you would feel exactly as I do. So I have come to you to talk it out.”

“Of course I understand.” Bridgit turned her back and walked to the end of the room. She longed to add: “It is quite as humiliating to keep a husband as to be kept by one; rather worse, as tradition and instincts don’t sanction it.” But there are some things that cannot be said, save, indeed, through the offices of the pineal gland; and as Bridgit, on her return march, paused and looked down upon Ishbel, standing in an attitude of rigid defiance, with quivering, nostrils and fierce half-closed eyes, possibly her friend received a telepathic flash, for she exclaimed impulsively:—

“You are in trouble, too. What is it?”

“Trouble is a fine general term for my ailment. I’m merely disgusted, dissatisfied—on general principles. Possibly it’s the effect of reading Nigel’s book.”

“I haven’t had time to read it, but I’m so happy it has created a _furore_, and hope he’ll come back to be lionized. Odd he should write about the slums.”

“Not at all. The slums are always being discovered by bright young men, who, with the true ardor of the explorer, proceed to enlighten the world. Nigel—the story’s not up to much—but he has the genius of expression, and, having made the amazing discovery of poverty, communicates his own amazement that it should have continued to exist in civilized countries up to the eve of the twentieth century—and his horror at its forms. Some of his scenes are quite awfully vivid. But he’s no sentimentalist; he doesn’t call for more charities; he doesn’t even pity the poor; he despises them as they deserve to be despised for being poor, for their asininity in permitting and enduring. But he demands in their name, since the best of them are wholly incompetent as thinkers, that the educated shall favor a form of Socialism which shall not only provide remunerative employment for them, but compel them to work—grinding the idle, the worthless, the vicious to the wall, and training the new generation to annihilate poverty. Great heaven! What a disgrace it is—that poverty—to the individual, to the world, to the poor, to the rich. I never realized it until I read that book. Other ‘discoverers’ have put my back up. But Nigel is one of us; and when he sees it—and what a clear vision he has—”

“How splendid!” cried Ishbel, also forgetting her own trouble for the moment. “And to be able to write like that will help him to forget Julia—must make all personal affairs seem insignificant. Would that we all had such a solace!”

“Solace! We are both strong enough to scorn the word. But having been awakened, I should have no excuse if I went to sleep again. Nor you. I haven’t made up my mind what I’ll do yet, merely that I’ll do something. I’m sick of society. It’s a bally grind. Five years of it are enough for any woman with brains instead of porridge in her skull. I’m glad you’ve had a shock about the same time—should have administered it if you hadn’t. Of course I shall continue to hunt, and keep house for Geoffrey, and watch over my child, but all that uses up about one-tenth of my energies, and no more. What I’ll do, I don’t know. I’m floundering. Lovers are no solution for me. They’re démodés, anyhow. I’m after some big solution both elemental and progressive. Of course I shall begin with politics—by studying our problems on all sides, I mean, not having hysterics over the party claptrap of the moment. That and a hard course in German literature will tone my mind up. It’s all run to seed. The rest will come in due course. Tell me what you propose to do. But of course you’ve had no time to decide.”

“Oh, but I have. I’m going to open a milliner shop.”

“What?” Mrs. Herbert sat down.

“You may think me vain, but I _know_ that I can trim hats better than any woman in London.”

“Yes—of course. But Mr. Jones?”

“I think I can make him consent—advance me the money—by persuading him that it is a new fad with the aristocracy—I’ll point out to him several titles over shops in Bond Street.”

“You have an Irish imagination. He won’t hear of it.”

“I’m sure I can talk him over—”

“Besides, it isn’t fair. It will make no end of talk, and him ridiculous. If you go in for independence—and do, by all means—don’t begin your sex emancipation with the sex methods of second-rate women. Men are supposed to be direct, straightforward, above the petty wiles to which women have been compelled to resort since man owned them. They are not, but, being the ruling sex, have forced the world to accept them at their own estimate. Besides, they find the standard convenient. That it is a worthy standard, no one will dispute. At least if we women cannot be wholly truthful, we need not be greater liars than they are. And we can score a point by adopting the same standard. Tell Mr. Jones that you have decided upon independence, that if he doesn’t put up the money, I will; but don’t throw dust in his eyes—I doubt if you could, anyhow.”

“Would you really?”

“Of course I would. It would be great fun. But what is the rest of your program? Do you propose to leave him? To cook his social goose?”

“No, he has been too generous, whatever his motives. No girl has ever had a better time, and nothing can alter the fact that he has rescued my family from poverty. Even if he cut both daddy and myself off his pay-roll, Aleece and Hermione and Shelah are rich enough to take care of the rest. I have done my duty by the family! No, I am quite willing to occupy a room in his house, go to the opera with him, even to such social affairs as I have time and strength for—I really intend to work, mind you, and to start in rather a small way, that I may pay back what I borrow the sooner.”

“How you have thought it all out! I wish I had something definite in sight. I despise the women that merely fill in time with intellectual pursuits, and I’ll be hanged if I take to settlement work—the last resource of the novelist who wants to make his elevated heroine ‘do something.’ I must find my particular ability and exercise it. To work with you actively in the shop would be a mere subterfuge, as I don’t need money. But never mind me—When are you going to speak to Mr. Jones?”

“This afternoon. I wanted to talk it out with you first. We Irish _are_ extravagant. I was afraid I might have got off my base a bit.”

“The world will think you mad, of course. But that only proves how sane you are. I wish I could get together about a hundred women, prominent socially—merely because society women are supposed to be all frivolous—to set a pace. I assume that the average woman in any class is a fool, but there is no reason why she should remain one; and the exceptional women, of whom there must be thousands, only lack courage, initiative, a leader. By the way, what do you hear of Julia? I haven’t had a letter for two months.”

“They are to remain at Bosquith until the dissolution of Parliament, nursing their constituency. She is doing the lady-of-the-manor act, visiting among the poor, petting babies, and all the rest of it—but putting in most of her time with her beloved books. She rarely mentions France’s name.”

“Never to me. But I know from one of my aunts—Peg—that he’s too occupied getting back his health and pleasing the duke to drink or let his temper go. No doubt he’s making a very decent husband. It may last. But whether it does or not, I’m not going to let Julia go. She’s made of uncommon stuff and must become one of us.”

XI

IT was with some trepidation that Ishbel sought her husband in the library a few hours later, and, in spite of her resolve to “be square,” could not resist assuming her most ingratiating manner. Her eyes were full of witchery, her kissable mouth wore its most provocative curves. Anything less like an emancipated wife or a prospective business woman never rose upon man’s haunted imagination; and as for Mr. Jones, who had been waiting for an explanation of some sort, he thought that she had come to apologize, to confess to a passing hysteria, possibly to jealousy induced by the fact that the wife of one of the South African millionaires had worn a ruby the night before that was the talk of the town. Well, she should have a bigger one if the earth could be made to yield it up.

Mr. Jones returned home every afternoon at precisely the same hour, and to-day, having “smartened up,” was sitting in a leather chair near the window with a finance review in his hand, when Ishbel entered. He did not rise, but asked her if she felt better, indicated a chair opposite his own, and waited for her to begin. She should have her ruby, or whatever it was she wanted, but not until she was properly humble and asked for it.

Ishbel smiled into those eyes that always reminded her of shoe buttons, and said sweetly, “I was horrid, of course, last night—”

“You were. And it was extremely unpleasant for me at the ball. Nobody addressed me except to ask where you were. I felt like a keeper minus his performing bear.” His tone was not without bitterness.

“I am so sorry. But I could not go. I wanted to think.”

“Think? Why on earth should you think? You have nothing to think about; merely to spend money and look beautiful.”

Ishbel smiled again, showing her dimples. There was not an edge of her inflexible will visible in the beautiful hazel eyes that she turned full upon him. “Well, the fact remains that I did think. And this is the result: I wish to earn my living.”

His jaw dropped. He thought she had lost her mind.

“It is quite true, and I mean to do it. I find I don’t like living on any one. We’ve never pretended to love each other. If we did—well, I think I should have felt the same way a little later. As it is, I don’t find it nice, living on you—”

“You’re my wife!” thundered Mr. Jones. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’ve no right to be your wife—”

“You’ve been a damned long time finding it out—”

“Five years. Bridgit says I have an Irish imagination. I’ve worked it persistently for five years, and worked it to death. I not only persuaded myself that I was doing you a tremendous service, but that I was entirely happy in being young and having all the luxuries and pleasures and gayeties that youth demands. I am only twenty-four. Five years in one’s first youth is not so long a time for delusion to last—”

“Have you fallen in love?”

“Not for more than three hours at a time. Somehow, you all fall short, one way or another. I think I have fallen in love with myself. At all events I want an individual place in the world, and, as the world is at present constituted, the only people that are really respected are those that either inherit fortunes or abstract the largest amount of money from other people. Even birth is going out of fashion. It doesn’t weigh a feather in the scale against money.”

“You’re talking like a lunatic. I couldn’t have got into society with all my millions without you, or some one else born with a marketable title, and you know it.” Mr. Jones was so astonished that only plain facts lighted the chaos of his mind.

“All the same you are far more respected than my poor old father, who is a lineal descendant of the O’Neil. Even if people did not respect you personally,—and of course they do,—they all respect you far more than they do me. Who would look at me if I had married one of your clerks—birth or no birth? And who regards me, as it is, but anything more than one of your best investments? I am useful to you and pay my way, but I’m of no earthly importance as an individual. I haven’t even as good a position as Bridgit, who inherited a fortune, although a bagatelle compared to yours—”

“Is that what you’re after—a slice of my fortune in your own right?”

“No, I only want enough to start me in business, and I shall pay it back—”

“I’ll have you put in a lunatic asylum. What business do you fancy you could make a go in? Mine?”

“No. The French bourgeoisie are about the only people that have solved the sex problem: every woman in the shop-keeping class, at least, is her husband’s working partner. But financial brains are not indigenous to my class. If I had one, I’d make myself useful to you in the only way that counts, and charge you high for my services. But as it is, I’m going to do the one thing I happen to be fitted for—I’m going to be a milliner.”

“A milliner!” roared Mr. Jones. His face was purple. It was all very well to assume that his butterfly had gone mad; he had a hideous premonition that she was in earnest and as sane as he was. In fact, he felt on the verge of lunacy himself. He could hear his house of cards rattling about him.

“Yes,” said Ishbel, smiling at him, as she had always smiled when asking him to invite another of her sisters to visit them. “I can trim hats beautifully. My hats are noted in London—”

“They ought to be. The bills that come from those Paris robbers—”

“I retrim every hat I get from the best of them. And I’ve pulled to pieces the hats of some of the richest of my friends. They will all patronize me. I shan’t rob them, and I have at least fifty ideas for this season that will be original without being bizarre—hats that will suit individual faces and not be duplicated. Oh, I know that I have a positive genius for millinery!”

The purple fell from Mr. Jones’s face, leaving it pallid. He stared at her, not only in consternation, but in deeper perplexity than he had ever felt in his life. Probably there is no state of the masculine mind so amusing to the disinterested outsider as the chaos into which it is thrown by some unexpected revelation of woman’s divergence from the pattern. It has only been during those long periods of the world’s history, as Bridgit and Ishbel had discovered, when men were at war, that women, poor, even in their castles, with every faculty strained to feed and rear their children, and no society of any sort, often without education, have given men the excuse to regard them as inferior beings—physical prowess at such times being the standard. But men have had so many rude awakenings that their continued blindness can only be explained by the fact that a large percentage of women, while no idler and lazier than many men, have been able to flourish as parasites through the accident of their sex. During every period of comparative peace and plenty, women of another caliber have shown themselves tyrannous, active, exorbitant in their demands, and mentally as alert as men. If they disappeared periodically, it was only because they had not fully found themselves, had exercised their abilities to no definite end. A recent German psychologist, one of the maddest and most ingenious, discovered something portentous in such periodicity as he took note of: the prominence of woman in the tenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, and again in the nineteenth and twentieth, assuming it to be the result of an excess of hermaphrodite and sexually intermediate forms, a state of affairs not unknown in the vegetable kingdom. Therefore, must woman’s periodic revolt mean nothing more than a biological phenomenon.

This theory would furnish food for much uneasiness were it not that the philosopher overlooked, deliberately or otherwise, the fact that woman’s star has flamed at some period or other in nearly every century, and that these periods have coincided with man’s ingenuous elevation of her to gratify his vanity while his chests were full and his weapons idle. Since the beginning of time, so far as we have any record of it, women have sprung to the top the moment that peace permitted wealth, leisure, and servants; and so far from their success being due to abnormality, their progress and development have been steadily cumulative. To-day, for the first time, they are highly enough developed to take their places beside men in politics, know themselves well enough to hold on, not drop the reins the moment the world’s conditions demand the physical activities of the fighting sex.

Although the great Woman’s Suffrage movement was, for the moment, in the rear of the world’s problems, thousands of women in England and America were thinking of little else, planning and working quietly, awaiting their leader. This psychological wave had washed over Ishbel’s sensitive brain and done its work quite as thoroughly as if she had gone to Manchester and sat at the feet of Dr. Pankhurst. It is the fashion to give Ibsen the credit of the revolt of woman from the tyranny of man, but that is sheer nonsense to any one acquainted with the history of woman. Ibsen was a symptom, a voice, as all great artists are, but no radical changes spring full fledged from any brain; they are the slow work of the centuries.

“Perhaps I should have put it another way,” said Ishbel. “I fancy the point is, not that the world respects you more for amassing wealth, but that you respect yourself so enormously for having won in the greatest and most difficult game that men have ever played. Diplomacy is nothing to it. That only requires brains and training. To coax gold from full pockets into empty ones and remain on the right side of the law, requires a magnetic needle in the brain, and is a distinct form of genius. Talk about riches not bringing happiness, I don’t believe there is a rich man living, even if he has only inherited his wealth, who does not find happiness in his peculiar form of self-respect, and in his contempt for the failures. If he has inherited, it is an achievement to retain, and when he has made his fortune, he must feel a bigger man than any king. Well, in my little way, I purpose to enjoy that sensation. And to make money, to accumulate wealth, is, I am positive, one of the primary instincts—if it were not, the world would have been socialistic a thousand years ago. But the secret desire in too many millions of hearts has prevented it—”

“My God!” roared Mr. Jones. “Have you got brains?”

“I hope so.” She smiled mischievously. “I couldn’t make money without them.”

“Suppose you had half a dozen children?”

“Of course, if I hadn’t thought it all out in time, I should bring them up first. But I feel sure the time will come when every self-respecting woman will want to be the author of her own income—when no girl will marry until she is.”

Mr. Jones looked and felt like the fisherman who has gone out in a sail-boat to catch the small edible prizes of the sea, and landed a whale.

“You never thought that all out for yourself,” he growled. “Where did you get it, anyhow?”

“Last night I realized that I had been learning unconsciously for years, and remembered everything worth while I had ever heard men and women talk about. After all, you know, clever men do talk to me.”

“Clever men are always fools about a pretty face.”

He got up and moved restlessly about the large room, too full of furniture for a man with big feet, and long awkward arms which he did not always remember to hold close to his sides. He longed for his punch bag. Ishbel smiled and looked out of the window.

“What in hell’s come over women?” he demanded. “I thought they only wanted love when they talked of happiness.”

“Oh, you’re like too many men—have got your whole knowledge of women from novels. Perhaps you even read the neurotic ones that are having a vogue just now. Wouldn’t that be funny! We women want many things besides love, we Englishwomen, at least; for we belong to the most highly developed nation on the globe. And we are the daughters of men as well as of women, remember. And we have heard the affairs of the world discussed at table since we left the nursery. That man doesn’t realize what he has made of us is a proof that he is so soaked in conventions and traditions that he is in the same danger of decay and submergence that nations have been when too long a period of power has made them careless and flaccid—and blind. We want love, but as a man wants it; enough to make us comfortable and happy, but not to absorb our whole lives—”

“What?” Mr. Jones swung round upon her, his little black eyes emitting red sparks. “That’s the most immoral speech I ever heard a woman make.”

“I shall keep faith with you,” said Ishbel, carelessly. “Don’t worry yourself. I’ve made a bargain with you and I shall stick to it, just as I shall be perfectly square in business. All I want is to be as much of an individual as you are, not an annex.”

Mr. Jones had an inspiration and resumed his seat. “Look here!” he said. “You say you play a square game, that you will live up to your contract with me; and marriage _is_ a partnership, by God! Well—if you go setting up for yourself, you injure my credit. I’m in a lot of things where credit is everything. Money (actual gold and silver) is not so plentiful as you think, and the greatest coward on earth. If there should be the slightest suspicion that I was unsound—”

“Why should there be? You will continue to live here in the same style, and I shall keep my rooms, and go about with you once or twice a week—even wear some of your jewels. What more could you ask?”

“What more?” Jones was purple again. “This: I didn’t marry to be made a laughing-stock of. Everybody’ll say I’m mean—”

“Not if you set me up. And you can get your good friend, _The Mart_, to say that I am ambitious to set a new style in fads—”

“There are some statements that no fool will swallow—let alone sharp business men in the City. Fad, indeed—when you will be standing on your feet all day in a milliner shop—unless—” hopefully—“you merely mean to put your name over the door to draw customers, and pocket the proceeds. That would be bad enough—but—”

“By no means. What possible satisfaction could I get out of making other people do what I want to do myself? You might as well ask an author if he would be content to let some one else write his books so long as he had his name on the title page and pocketed the profits. The joy of succeeding must lie in the effort, in knowing that you are doing something that no one else can do in quite the same way. I can be an artist even in hats, and I propose to be one.”

“And if I refuse you the capital?”

“Bridgit will lend it to me.”

“I am to be blackmailed, so!”

“What is blackmail?”

“As if a woman need ask! Every woman is a blackmailer by instinct. I suppose that if I won’t give you the money for this ridiculous enterprise, you will leave my house—ruin me socially, as well as financially?”

But Ishbel’s wits were far nimbler than his. “No,” she said sweetly, “I can never forget that I owe you a great deal. Whether you advance me the capital or not, I shall continue to live here, and entertain for you whenever I have time.”

The mere male was helpless, defeated. A month later his name was over a shop in Bond Street, and the success of the lady whose title preceded it was so immediate that he began to brag about her in the City. But he was by no means reconciled. His order of life, that new order in which he had revelled during five brief years, was sadly dislocated. Many husbands and wives are invited separately in London society, but he made the bitter discovery that when Ishbel was forced to decline an invitation for luncheon or dinner he was expected to follow suit. He could walk about at receptions or teas if he chose, but it became instantly patent that no woman, save those whose husbands were in his power, would see him at her table when she could get out of it. There were one or two new millionnaires in society that had achieved a full measure of personal popularity, and were sometimes asked without their wives, but Jones was hopelessly dull in conversation, and had a way of “walking up trains,” and knocking over delicate objects with his elbows. And then he was unpardonably ugly to look at; moreover, evinced no disposition to pay the bills of any woman but his wife. That was a fatal oversight on Mr. Jones’s part, but no one had ever been kind enough to give him a hint.

All this was bad enough, but in addition he perceived that while society patronized Ishbel’s shop, and pretended to admire or be amused, they had respected her far more when she was reigning as a beauty and spending her husband’s vast income as carelessly as the spoiled child smashes its costly toys. There is little real respect where there is no envy, and no one envies a working woman until she has made a fortune and can retire. Ishbel had dazzled the world with her splendid luck, added to her beauty and proud descent. It had called her “a spoiled darling of fortune,” a “fairy princess,” and such it had envied and worshipped. But she had stepped down from her pedestal; her halo had fallen off; she was no longer a member of the leisured class, haughty and privileged even when up to its neck in debt. Mr. Jones’s position in the City was not affected, for men knew him too well, but society suspected that his fortune was not what it had been, and that his wife wanted more money to spend, or was providing against a rainy day. If neither suspicion was true, then she was disloyal to her class, and a menace, a horrid example. Her personal popularity was unaffected, but her position was not what it was, no doubt of that, and the soul of Mr. Jones was exceeding bitter.

XII

LORD ROSEBERY’S government, despite the duke’s optimistic predictions, did not resign until June 24, consequently the general election was not fought until July, and during all this time Julia was kept at Bosquith; France, wholly amiable to his cousin’s wishes, stuck close to his borough. He had not a political dogma, cared no more for the Conservatives and Liberal-Unionists, than for Nationalists, Liberals, Radicals, and Socialists, and he had no intention of boring himself in Westminster save when his cousin required his vote. But he had planned a very definite and pleasant scheme of life, and the enthusiastic favor of the head of his house was essential to its success. He intended to re-let his own place in Hertfordshire, and live with the duke, both in London and in the country, until such time as his patience should be rewarded and the divine law of entail give him his own. He not only craved the luxury of the duke’s great establishments (as English people understand luxury), but, quite aware of the position he had forfeited among men, he was determined to win it back. Not that he felt any symptoms of regeneration, but the pride, which heretofore had raised him above public opinion, assumed a new form during his long convalescence, and prompted respectability and enjoyment of the social position he had inherited.

His cousin, although knowing vaguely that his heir had been “a bit wild,” and not as popular as he might be, was far too unsophisticated to guess the truth, and too surrounded by flatterers and toadies to hear what would manifestly displease him. Moreover, although France was under such strong suspicion of card cheating that no man would play with him, he had proved himself too clever to be caught, therefore had escaped an open scandal. He had twice avoided being co-respondent in divorce suits, once by shifting the burden on to the shoulders of a fellow-sinner, and once by securing, through a detective agency, such information that the wronged husband let the matter drop rather than suffer a counter-suit. But society was not his preserve. He was a man who had haunted byways where women were unprotected, and far from the limelight; and although there had been for twenty years the contemptuous impression that he was one of the greatest blackguards in Europe, that there was no villainy to which he had not stooped, he was, after all, little discussed, for he was much out of England, and, when off duty, went to Paris for his pleasures.

But although he had rather revelled in his dark reputation, he had now undergone a change of mind if not of heart. He had had a long draught of respectability, and of deference from his future menials and the several thousand good men in his constituency who had never heard of him before he came to Bosquith, as the convalescent heir of their popular duke, and won them by looking “every inch a man”; he had a young and beautiful wife with whom he was as much in love as was in him to love any one but himself, and in whom he recognized a valuable aid to his plan of social rehabilitation. Established in London as hostess of one of its oldest and most exclusive private palaces, with every opportunity to exercise her youthful charm (like the duke he despised brains in women), she would take but one season to draw about her a court anxious to stand well with the future Duchess of Kingsborough. And he was her husband. They could not ignore him if they would; and they would have less and less inclination, viewing him daily as a man ostentatioulsy devoted to his wife, taking his parliamentary duties very seriously indeed (he knew exactly the right phrases to get off), and living a life so exemplary and regular that his past would be dismissed with a good-natured smile (for was he not a future duke?), or openly doubted for want of proof. He knew that some people would never speak to him, others never invite him to their tables, although he might, with his wife and cousin, receive a card to their receptions; but, then, London society was very large, and he could endure the contempt of the few in the complaisance of the many.

His first quarry was the duke, already disposed to like him extremely, as they were the last males of their race, and latterly quite softened by certain sympathies and anxieties for his afflicted relative that had never infused his dry smug nature before. He was also one of those survivals that like anecdotes, and France, in his wandering life, had insensibly collected an infinite number. Naturally the most silent of men, he now made himself so agreeable that the duke, long companionless, himself suggested the permanent residence of the Frances under his several roofs, overrode all his cousin’s manly objections, and looked forward to a revival of the historic splendors of Kingsborough House with something like enthusiasm. France cemented the new bond when he appeared, as soon as his convalescence was over, at morning prayers, and even compelled the attendance of the rebellious Julia.

This alien in the great house of France detested family prayers. They were very long, the duke’s dull languid gaze travelled over his shoulder every time she sat when she should have knelt, and they came at an hour when she wanted to be on the moor or riding along the cliffs. But when she openly expressed herself, her husband, although he picked her up and kissed her many times, unobservant that she wriggled, replied peremptorily:—

“Not another word, my little beauty. To prayers you must go. It’s a rotten bore, but it’s the duty of a wife to advance her husband’s interests. Get our mighty cousin down on us, and we live in Hertfordshire all the year round.”

Although she hid the thought, Julia would have submitted to more than prayers to avoid living alone in a small house in the country with her husband. She had heard so much of duty during the last year (even her mother’s letters were full of it), that she had set her teeth in the face of matrimony, persuaded herself that France was no more offensive than other husbands, that hers was the common lot of woman, and, after reading Nigel’s book, that she was singularly fortunate in not having been born in the slums. But although she refused to admit to her consciousness a certain terrified mumbling in the depths of her brain, she did acknowledge that she no longer had the least desire for a child, and that she hated the scent of the pomade on her husband’s moustache. It was a pomade that had been fashionable for several years, and was used as sparingly as possible on France’s bristles; but lesser trifles have killed love in women, and Julia, frankly unloving, conceived an unconquerable aversion for this sickly scent; to this day it rises in her memory as associated with the abominable injustice that had been committed on her youth.

But she kept her mind and time fully occupied. She visited the sick, rode her good horse, and read until there was nothing left in the Bosquith library to satisfy her still insatiable mind. Then, for the first time, she realized that she had not a penny in her purse, had not had since her first few weeks in London. She made out a list of books she wanted, surmounted her diffidence, and asked her husband if she might order them from London. France, when she approached him, was smoking a pipe by the library fire, his cannon-ball head sunken luxuriously into the cushions of the chair, and his glassy eyes half closed. He pulled her down on his knee and read the list, then laughed aloud and pinched her ear.

“Never heard of one of these books, but they have an expensive look—wager not one of them costs under a pound. That would mean about ten pounds—by Gad! That would never do. I’m economizing and you must, too; for although we shall live with Kingsborough, we can’t expect him to pay for our clothes and all the rest of it. Besides, I don’t want an intellectual wife—had no idea you read such bally rot. Intellectual wives are bores, get red noses, and rims round their eyes. Jove! Think of those eyes gettin’ red and dim. I’d make a bonfire of all the books in England first. No, my lady, it’s your business to look pretty, and to remember a famous saying of our future king: ‘Bright women, yes; but no damned intellect.’ We want to have a rippin’ time as soon as Salisbury is in again, and I won’t have you frightenin’ people off.”

“I never supposed you would care so much for society,” said Julia, lamely. “I always think of you as a sailor.”

“I want what’ll be mine before long—what I’ve been kept out of long enough,” he answered savagely.

Julia was shocked. It was the first time he had betrayed himself, so anxious had he been for her good opinion, so careful not to excite himself with tempers until his heart was quite strong again. As she left his knee and turned her disconcerting eyes on him, he recovered himself with a laugh.

“I believe it’s all your mother’s fault. She told me it was your fate—by all the stars!—to be a duchess, and I don’t think I’ve got it out of my head since. But you know I’m devilish fond of my cousin—only one I’ve got, for those old hags don’t count. I’ll chuck such ideas, and—” his voice became sonorous with virtue—“think only of his kindness and of serving my country when my time comes.”

The time came in July, and he carried his borough almost without effort, so irresistible was the conservative reaction. He was not much of an orator, but not much was required of him. He made a fine appearance on a platform, and when, after a flattering introduction by the chairman, he stood up before a sympathetic audience, and between some scraps of party wisdom, furnished by the duke, doubled up his aristocratic hand and wedged it firmly into his manly thigh, and brought out in all its inflections: “Indeed, I _may_ say—Indeed, _I_ may say—Indeed, I may _say_—_Indeed_ I may say!” the applause was stupendous.

Julia, sitting behind him with the duke, had much ado not to laugh aloud, but, then, Julia was an alien, and had no appreciation of gentlemen’s oratory.

She had taken more interest in the wives of the voters, and been relieved to find that their poverty was rather picturesque than bitter—Nigel’s book had given her a profound shock—but had wept at some of the tales told by women that had relatives in London and the great manufacturing towns of the north. After France’s final triumph, when he had been carried back to Bosquith on the shoulders of several honest yeomen, followed by a cheering mob of several hundred more, she asked him impulsively (being electrified herself for the moment) if he might not serve his country best by making a crusade against poverty. But he looked at her in such genuine bewilderment that she dropped the subject.

XIII

TO France’s intense disgust Parliament met on August 12, that consecrated date when grouse are first hunted from their lairs. There was nothing for it, however, but to go up to London with the triumphant duke and sit on a bench through at least one hot hour each day. The rest of his hours he spent at his club, to avoid meeting his patriotic relative, and Julia, for the first time, found herself possessed of a certain measure of liberty. To be sure, she was several times caged in the House of Commons, and once slept above the peers, but for the most part she was left to herself, the duke almost forgetting her in the joy of his occasional chats in the lobby with Lord Salisbury, and the excitements provided by Mr. Chamberlain. He had neither hope nor wish for the onerous duties of a cabinet minister, but for many years politics had formed the only excitement of his rather colorless life; whether his party were in or out, he always managed to be of some slight use to it in the upper House. He was laughed at sometimes by the giants of his party, but on the whole regarded as a safe reliable man, and received doles of flattery to keep his enthusiasm alive.

Everybody was out of town except Ishbel, who was casting nets for the rich tourists, and Julia sat for hours in the gay little shop on the second floor of an old building in Bond Street, watching her friend with wide admiring eyes, and even envying her a little. This, however, she suppressed. She was to be a duchess, and that was the end of it. She would fill her high destiny to the best of her ability, but she wished that meanwhile she could earn a little money, or some unknown relative would leave her a legacy. France was still “economizing” and gave her no allowance; she literally had not money for cab fare. She was determined, however, never to ask him for money again, so deep had been her mortification when he had refused her simple request for books.

Parliament remained in session something over a month, being prorogued on September 15. The duke returned to Bosquith for the rest of the grouse season, opened his house in Derbyshire for the pheasant shooting, and went again to Bosquith for partridges and hunting. This time there were guests. Many of them were carefully selected from the most ardent supporters of the present Government; but Mrs. Winstone, who, deeply to her satisfaction, was invited to coach and assist the young chatelaine, was permitted to invite “a few younger people, but no really young people.” The duke was alive to the necessity of maturing his heir’s wife as rapidly as possible. The company was always an extremely distinguished one, as Mrs. Winstone took pains to impress upon the somewhat indifferent Julia; not the least exalted members of the Government honored the various parties, and a good many of the younger men accepted invitations which would force them into association with Harold France, partly to please Mrs. Winstone, partly out of curiosity, and principally because the duke’s shootings, always kept up but seldom placed at the service of guests, were famous. Julia, alive to her responsibilities, set her mind upon becoming an accomplished hostess, and although the everlasting talk of politics and sport bored her, she was rewarded with a few pleasant acquaintances, who in a measure consoled her for the temporary loss of Bridgit and Ishbel.

There was a fine old Jacobean mansion on the estate in Derbyshire, and Julia reminded herself that she was realizing a youthful dream, admired the brilliant appearance of the women at dinner, and went occasionally to the coverts. But the immense beautiful house had the more notable attraction of a fine library, and Julia’s happiness was further increased from October until the middle of February by the fact that she saw less of her husband than formerly. No more ardent sportsman breathed; he could kill all day, and when he came home at night was agreeably fatigued and ready for sleep. He was as much in love as ever, but it was long since he had been able to command all the pleasures of his class, and he meant to enjoy every good that came his way to the last nibble. No more methodical soul ever lived. Julia sometimes wondered if he were not a creature manufactured and wound up, like Frankenstein, rather than man born of woman, but it was long before she found the clew to his character.

When they returned to Bosquith, Julia had even more freedom than during the weeks devoted to the puncturing of grouse and pheasant. The women had joined the men for luncheon during the grouse season, tramping the moors in very short skirts and very thick boots; and in Derbyshire, the coverts not being too far from the house, the men had returned for their midday meal. But the farms, with their turnip fields, were many miles from the moors which surrounded the castle of Bosquith; the women showed less enthusiasm; and it was out of the question for the men to return, even in a break, for luncheon. Therefore, did the women, including Mrs. Winstone, sleep late, and Julia found the morning hours her own. She enjoyed her freedom at first in long rides alone, and with no particular object, but in the course of a week she accidentally made the acquaintance of one of the tenants, Mr. Leggins (the sportsmen had exhausted his field and moved on), and she found his somewhat radical discourse refreshing after the undiluted and therefore unargumentative conservatism of the castle’s guests. Mr. Leggins, indeed, when the intimacy had progressed, did not hesitate to express himself on the injustice of annually sacrificing his best fields to the sporting pride of hereditary lords of the soil. One argument in England against giving women the vote is that they are all conservatives at heart, but Julia, at least, seated under the mighty beams of the old farm-house, with a bowl of bread and milk before her, listening to the old man inveigh against the iniquity of laws that forced a family like his own to pay rent from generation to generation, a rent which increased with every improvement made by the tenant, instead of being permitted to buy their land and feel “as good as the next man,” assumed that there was something wrong with the world, and often wondered if she were not in the sixteenth century, when the farm-house had been built; wondered still more why the world progressed so rapidly in some things and remained stationary in others. Mr. Leggins, in those early morning hours, told her something of Socialism, and she began to have grave doubts if she should ever become a duchess, if those lagging millions would not suddenly awaken and come to the front with a bound.

But these grave questions agitated her fleetingly at this period, for there were other attractions at the Leggins farm. It embraced a famous ruin, and the farmer kept a small public house of “soft drinks” for its many visitors. This was Julia’s first glimpse of the genus tourist, and its very difference from the guests at the castle entranced her. She often spent the entire morning watching and often talking to strange people with frank inquisitive eyes and an amazing thoroughness in exploration. Many had accents undreamed of in her short sojourn on this planet. Mr. Leggins called them “Americans,” and Julia sunned herself in their breezy democracy, and resolved to read their history as soon as she returned to London and its public libraries; no recognition of their existence was to be found at Bosquith. Julia had seen several Americans in Ishbel’s shop, but they had been so very elegant, and such good imitations of the British grande dame, that they had not impressed her.

These short-skirted, “shirt-waisted” people, with flying veils—generally blue—attached precisely or rakishly to hats, sailor or alpine, with faces, more often than not, gay and careless, but sometimes with an anxious line between the brows as if fearful they might “miss something” while photographing even the diamond panes of the farm-house windows, thrilled Julia with the sense of a new world to discover, of a country which must be divinely free since it once had snapped its fingers in mighty England’s face, and now elected a President every four years (this much Mr. Leggins had told her), and gave its humblest man a vote. Of the peculiar tyrannies which have grown up under the Constitution of the United States (tyrannies impossible under an autocracy) Julia, of course, knew nothing; and although she had no cause to complain of monarchical tyranny in Great Britain, she was beginning to feel the stirrings of a dim resentment against the insignificance of her own estate. Not only had Ishbel talked to her a good deal during the short session of Parliament, but she observed for herself that the duke’s house parties were organized with pointed reference to the pleasure and comfort of the male sex. The men were given the best rooms, the board was set with the heavy food necessary to the replenishment of their energies, they shot all day long, barely opening their mouths to speak at table, and often went to bed immediately after dinner. The women were invited merely to ornament the table and make the men forget their fatigue, or to amuse them if they felt inclined now and then to vary sport with flirtation. For these heroic ladies not one amusement during the shooting season was designed; of course they would hunt later. No men were asked save those that shot. Even “old Pirie,” and Lord Algy went out with the guns. Julia wondered why these women came, and finally concluded that some came in search of husbands or lovers, others to keep an eye on husbands or lovers. Some, no doubt, enjoyed the rest at no expense to themselves, but all were frankly bored. Now and again Julia, at tea time, heard a woman discourse upon the happy fate of the American woman, who had “things all her own way,” and to whom man was a slave. Listening to the animated babble about the table in Farmer Leggins’s living room, where the Americans imbibed milk, bottled lemon-squash, and sarsaparilla, Julia longed to ask the prettiest of them if they were spoiled wives. France professed to adore her madly, but he neither petted nor spoiled her. She was his prize exhibit, his woman, his harem of one, and he was immensely satisfied with his discrimination and his luck. He never even asked her if she were content, if she were bored. What liberty she had she was forced to scheme for, like these visits to the fascinating public house of Farmer Leggins. Had the duke or even Mrs. Winstone seen her sitting at that table, sometimes cutting bread, always talking to people she had never seen before and never would see again, they would have been outraged; and, no doubt, as the times were too advanced to shut her up, she would have been compelled to ride with a groom, and give her word to ignore farm-houses (save when votes were wanted), and to speak to no one to whom she had not properly been introduced. But all three of her guardians were happily ignorant of her performances, and no mortal ever enjoyed her liberty more, or took a naughtier delight in it.

One morning she was sitting beside Farmer Leggins uncorking bottles and ladling out milk (his son Sam’s wife, who kept house for him, was away), when three people alighted from a carriage who interested her immediately. Not only were the woman and the young girl, and even the boy, dressed more smartly than was common to the tourist in that part of the country, but they suddenly ducked their heads in a peculiar way, and entered the farm-house hat first. The rest of the room was occupied by a party of school-teachers, who invariably wear out their old clothes in Europe, and Julia gave the newcomers her undivided attention. Mr. Leggins also rose with some alacrity, and placed them at a small table by themselves, waiting until their pleasant voices assured him that they had all their appetites demanded.

“They’re Californians,” whispered Mr. Leggins, as he returned to Julia’s side. (As the reader is now acquainted with every known dialect, it is not necessary to torment him with the Yorkshire.) “San Franciscans, to be exact. I always can tell them by the way they put their heads down in a breeze—wind always blows in San Francisco, and it’s second nature to butt against it. I know the earmarks of every state in their union—section, at least—and not only by their accents. You can know a Californian because he hasn’t any, but the others would butter bread, except when they happen to have had brass long enough to rub it off in Europe. Even then they keep a bit of it. But I know them by other things. This party of school missuses is from what they call ‘the East’; they’ve every one got suspicion in their eyes, and are that close! It’s a wonder they don’t bring scales to weigh my bread. The ‘Middle West’ people are like children, pleased with everything, and crazy about ruins; free with the brass, too. The ‘Southerners’ look as if they ought to be rich and ain’t, but never haggle. The high-toned ‘Easterners,’ haven’t an exclamation point among them, are so polite they make you feel like dirt, pay with gold and count the change. Where on earth is Sam?”

Sam had disappeared shortly after showing the school-teachers over the ruin, and the Californians had risen, manifestly awaiting a guide.

Sam (who occasionally stole away to watch the shooting) was not to be found. Julia volunteered to show the party over the ruin.

“I’d be that grateful!” exclaimed Mr. Leggins; and to the Californians, “There ain’t much to the ruin, and she knows it as well as Sam.”

The lady looked at her curiously, for the guide wore her habit, and manifestly was not of the house of Leggins, but she expressed herself satisfied, and followed Julia across the bridge that spanned the ditch. The young girl was too weary with much travel for interest in anything, but the youth had already fallen a victim to Julia’s charms, and manœuvred to reach her side. He was a fine-looking lad, tall for his years, which might have been fifteen, with a shock of black hair, keen black-gray eyes, and a dark strongly made face. It was a new-world face, with something of the pioneer, something of the Indian in it, but, oddly enough, almost aggressively modern. Julia had observed him under her lashes, and wished he were older. Few men tourists came that way, and this boy was of a more marked type than any of them.

“My, but this is bully!” he exclaimed. “You won’t mind my saying it, but I’ve been watching you for half an hour—couldn’t eat—but—well—I never saw a prettier girl even in California.”

“Then you _are_ a Californian?” asked Julia, much amused. “And a San Franciscan?”

“Now, how can you tell that?”

“Mr. Leggins says you all hold your heads forward on account of the winds—to keep your hats on, I suppose.”

“Jiminy, that’s clever! Fancy an English farmer having sense enough for that. Ours are pretty stupid—perhaps because they live so far apart. This whole island isn’t as big as the state of California.”

“You don’t mean it,” gasped Julia, not in the least resenting this characteristic boast.

“And there are real forests in it—primeval.” The youth was delighted with the impression he had made. “Not woods that you can see the horizon from the middle of. Great Scott! this island is cut up. You can’t get rid of the towns, except on these big estates. Why, in the manufacturing districts they tail into one another. In California—”

“Dan!” said a reproving voice from the rear. “Stop bragging. This is my brother’s first visit to Europe,” added the lady, with a smile. “And like all Americans in similar circumstances, he observes only to contrast and deprecate. He’ll behave much better on his next visit. That first protest is only defiance, anyhow—to still the small voice which tells us how new and crude we are in the face of all this antiquity and beauty.”

“Oh!” said Julia, smiling. “I fancy that if I visited your country, I should be too awed even to feel my own littleness.”

“That is the prettiest speech I ever heard!” The lady extended her hand. “Won’t you tell me your name? Mine is Bode, and this is my sister, Emily Tay, and my brother, Daniel Tay.”

“I am Mrs. France. It is delightful to know your names—”

“Mrs.!” gasped the boy, his face falling until he looked almost idiotic; but Mrs. Bode’s eyes sparkled.

“Not of Bosquith?” she asked.

Julia nodded gloomily.

“I have met Mrs. Winstone, and last summer I read all about you when your husband was so ill.”

“Read about me?” Julia’s mouth opened almost as wide as young Tay’s. “Where?”

“Oh, our correspondents don’t let us miss anything, and that was a big plum for the end of the season. I know all about your romantic marriage, and your still more romantic West Indian home.” She had bred herself too carefully to add, “and that you will one day be a duchess”; but the words danced through her mind, and she felt that she was having an adventure. Julia was in no condition to notice any faux pas; her imagination was visualizing her insignificant self in the columns of a newspaper seven thousand miles away, and she felt a strange thrill, such as what small deferences she had received from servants and toadies had never excited in her: the first vague pricking of ambition.

“There was a picture of you in the Sunday supplement of one of the papers,” went on Mrs. Bode. “Of course I guessed it wasn’t you—looked suspiciously like one of our own belles touched up—”

“My picture! I’ve never had my picture taken.”

“The more pity,” said Mrs. Bode, with gracious gayety. “I should beg for one as a souvenir, if you had.”

“Gee whiz! My camera!” cried young Tay, recovering himself, and whipping the camera off his shoulder. “Will—would you stand?”

“Of course!” Julia not only had fallen in love with her new friends, but rejoiced in doing something which she instinctively knew would annoy her husband. When woman’s ego is fumbling, it is only in these world-old acts of petty and secret vengeance that it triumphs for a moment over the sex that has bruised it.

She posed, with and without her hat, against the gray walls of the ruin, in a group with Mrs. Bode and Emily, and again with young Tay alone. Then she lit her candle and led them down the winding passage to the room where Mary of Scotland was supposed to have slept on her way to Fotheringay. As they emerged once more into the court, she impulsively asked them to come that afternoon to the castle for tea.

“I am sure my aunt will be enchanted to see you,” she added, “and I can show you over Bosquith, which is much more interesting than this.”

“I’ll be delighted,” said Mrs. Bode; and Julia, who had experienced a moment of fright at her temerity, took courage again at the American’s matter-of-fact acceptance. Pride also came to her aid. Why should she not ask whom she chose to Bosquith? Was she not its chatelaine? Her aunt was one of her guests, monitress though she might be. To be sure, she had been forbidden to ask Bridgit or Ishbel, but, then, the duke had a personal dislike for both—he now thought Ishbel quite mad and had written her father a letter of condolence; he was hospitable in his way, and could find no objection to these delightful travellers that knew Mrs. Winstone.

She blushed and stammered, “I must ask you not to say anything about my helping Mr. Leggins, and being so much at home here—”

“Of course not!” Mrs. Bode, as she would have expressed it, “twigged instanter.” “We met while exploring the ruins, and got into conversation.”

“You are so kind. And you will come at five—no, four, and then I can show you the castle before tea.”

“We shall be there at four. Thank you so much.”

They parted, mutually delighted with their morning’s adventure, the ladies going to their carriage, and young Tay gallantly assisting Julia to mount her horse.

“Jiminy!” he whispered ecstatically. “You’ve got hair! And eyes! Stars ain’t in it! Say, I’m awful glad I’m going to see you again, and I’m awful glad I can take your picture back to California with me!”

He was only fifteen, but Julia blushed as she had never blushed for Nigel. It may be that our future lies in sealed cells in our brains, as all life in the universe, past, present, future, is said to be Now to the Almighty. Under certain lightning stabs it may be shocked into a second’s premature awakening.

Julia, however, was annoyed with herself, said “Goodby” rather crossly, and rode off.

XIV

MRS. BODE was one of those astonishing Americans who, often with no social affiliations whatever, even in their native city, or living on the very edges of civilization, have yet so wide and accurate a knowledge of the cardinal families of the various capitals of the world, that they would be invaluable in the offices of Burke, Debrett, and the Almanach de Gotha. Whether this enterprising variety of the genus Americana invests in these valuable works of reference, or merely studies them in the public libraries, ourselves would not venture to state; but that is beside the question; some highly specialized magnet in their brains has accumulated the knowledge, and less ambitious Americans, even aristocratic foreigners, are often humbled by them when floundering conversationally among the ramifications of the peerages of Europe. These students, if New Yorkers, take no interest in the “first families” of any state in the American Union save their own, but if a malignant chance has deposited them on what stage folk call “the road,” then are their mental woodsheds stored with the family trees of their own state, _and_ New York. Never of any other state: Washington is “too mixed”; Boston is “obsolete”; Chicago is “too new for any use”; San Francisco is too picturesque to be aristocratic; the South can take care of itself; and the rest of the country, with the possible exception of Philadelphia, would never presume to enter the discussion.

Nor is this the extent of their knowledge. They can talk fluently about all the great dressmakers and milliners that dwell in the centres of fashion, and even of those so exclusive as to cater only to the best-bred Americans, and they are always the first to appear in the new style, even though they have no place to show it but the street. Moreover, they know every scandal in Europe, scandals of aristocrats and prime donne, that no newspaper has ever scented. They discuss the great and the famous of the world as casually as their own acquaintance, dropping titles and other formalities in a manner that bespeaks a keen and secret pleasure that the less gifted or less energetic mortal may sigh for in vain.

Mrs. Bode came of good pioneer stock, her sturdy Kansas grandfather, Daniel Tay, having been among the first to brave the hardships of the emigrant trail and make “his pile” in California. Not that he made it in one picturesque moment. He was only moderately lucky in the mines. But he could make pies, and miners were willing to pay little bags of gold-dust for them. He set up a shop for rough-and-ready clothing in Sacramento, with a pie counter under the awning. At all times he made a handsome income, and when the miners came trooping in drunk and reckless, he cleaned up almost as much as the gambling-houses.

In due course, he migrated to San Francisco, and, abandoning a plebeian method of livelihood of which his wife had learned to disapprove, embarked in a commission business including hardware and groceries. In those wild and fluctuating days he made and lost several fortunes. When his son, Daniel Second, grew up, he was a fairly prosperous merchant, with connections in Central America and China. His coffee, spices, teas, and such other delicacies as even the renowned California soil refused to produce were the best on the market; and had it not been for the old gaming fever in his blood, which sent him on periodic sprees into the stock-market, he would have accumulated a large fortune and permitted his wife and daughters to assist in the making of San Francisco’s aristocracy. But they were always being either burned out or sold out of their fine new houses, and Mrs. Tay died a disappointed woman. The Southerners held the social fort and she had never crossed its threshold. To be sure, she had washed the miners’ overalls in the rear of the Sacramento store while the pies were being devoured in front, but ancient history is made very rapidly in California, and there were signs that several no better than herself were “getting their wedge in.”

Mr. Tay soon followed his wife into the imposing vault on Lone Mountain, but not before adjuring his son to “let stocks alone.” The advice was unnecessary, for Daniel Second was a shrewd cautious man, immune from every temptation the fascinating city of San Francisco could offer. He put the business he had inherited on a sure foundation, rebuilt modestly whenever he was burned out, and was impervious to the laments of his pretty second wife that they were “nobodies.” Mrs. Tay felt that heaven had endowed her with that talent most envied of women, the social, but her husband was more than content to be a nobody so long as his financial future was secure; and it was not until his oldest daughter, Charlotte,—or “Cherry” as she was fondly called,—came home from boarding-school for the last time, that he was persuaded to buy a large and hideous “residence” with a mansard roof, a cupola, and bow-windows, suddenly thrown on the market by a disappearing capitalist, and “splurge a bit.”

The splurging carried them but a short distance. St. Mary’s Hall, Benicia, where Cherry had received the last of her education, was an aristocratic institution, and she had made some good friends among the girls. But although they came to her first party, and she was asked now and again to large entertainments at their homes, it was more than patent that the Tays were not “in it.” There was no reason in the world why they should not be, for they were not even “impossible” (as the old folks had been); but whether Mrs. Tay was less gifted socially than she had fancied, or people so long out of it were regarded with suspicion or cold indifference by the venerable holders of the social fort, or Tay’s modest fortune was not worth while, in view of the enormous fortunes that had been made recently in the railroads and the Nevada mines, and “Society was already large enough,” certain it is that Mrs. Tay and her step-daughter spent long days in the library of their big house in the Western Addition, consoling themselves with books (and who shall say that Burke and the Almanach de Gotha were not among them?) or “the finest view in the world.”

This unhappy state of affairs lasted for two years, and then Cherry had an inspiration. One of her father’s friends was the owner of a powerful newspaper, and he had a friend as powerful as himself in the state whence came the present Minister to the Court of St. James. Armed with letters from these two makers and unmakers of reputations, Cherry took her mother to London and requested to be presented at court. The request was granted, and this great event, as well as their subsequent adventures in the most good-natured society in the world, were cabled to the San Francisco newspapers.

Mr. Tay had snorted in disgust when the plan was unfolded to him, but had yielded to sulks, tears, and hysterics. One season, however, was all he would finance; but his wife and daughter, although they had hoped to remain abroad for two years, returned with the less reluctance as they were now “names” in the inhospitable city of their birth. These names had been embroidered for four months with royalty, a few of the best titles in Burke, and many of the lesser. (“Precious few will know the difference,” said Cherry, scornfully.)

Their position, as a matter of fact, was somewhat improved; Cherry was admitted to the sacred Assemblies, and people allowed themselves to admire her Parisian gowns, her pretty face, and refined vivacious manner. At the end of the season she captured the son of one of the new great millionnaires. The Tays had arrived. The past was forgotten by themselves if not by other walking blue books, that fine scavenger element in Society which allowed no one permanently to sink “pasts,” ages, ancestral pies, saloons, brothels, wash-tubs, or any of the humble but honest beginnings which fain would repose beneath the foundations of San Francisco. But the Tays, like many another, fancied their past forgotten, whatever the fate of their neighbors; and, as a matter of fact, they were now so firmly established that three divorces could not have dislodged them. Mrs. Bode, in her superb mansion on Nob Hill, forged ahead so steadily that she enjoyed excellent prospects of being a Society Queen, when the old guard should have died off, and Mrs. Tay had stuccoed her house, shaved off the bow-windows, flattened the roof, replaced rep and damask with silks and tapestries, and both were happy women.

All this may sound contemptible to those that enjoy a proper scorn of Society; but it must be remembered that as the world is at present constituted, women, not forced to work for their living, and born without talent, have little outlet for their energies. And of these energies they often have as full a supply as men. Besides, they don’t know any better.

Mrs. Bode was thirty-two at the time the Tay family entered Julia’s life, and although she had been abroad many times since her marriage, this was the first visit of her younger brother and sister; Mr. Tay “having no use for Europe and the Californians who were always running about in it when they had the finest slice of God’s own country to live in.” But Mrs. Bode was an avowed enemy of the “provincial point of view,” and justly prided herself upon being one of the most cosmopolitan women in San Francisco society. She was determined that her little half-sister, to whom she was devoted, having no children of her own, should enjoy all the advantages she so sadly had lacked, and Dan’s obstreperous Americanism had “tired” her. So, for the last eight months, with or without the amiable Mr. Bode, and in spite of cables from pa, who wished Daniel Third to finish his education as quickly as possible and enter the firm, she had piloted her charges through ruins, picture galleries, cities ancient and modern, museums, and mountain landscapes; besides forcing them to study French and German two hours a day with travelling tutors; until Emily yawned in the face of everything, and Dan threatened to cable to his father for funds and return by himself. But Mrs. Bode, whose own leave of absence was expiring, held them well in hand, and announced her intention of bringing them over every summer. This program she carried out as far as Emily was concerned, but it was fifteen years before Daniel Tay found time or inclination to leave his native land again.

Their reception at the castle was all that Julia could have wished. Mrs. Winstone was delighted to see them, Mrs. Bode being impeccable in her critical eyes inasmuch as she had no accent, did not flaunt her riches, and was never so aggressively well dressed that she made an Englishwoman feel dowdy. If she had been told of the Sacramento store, with the pies in front and the wash-tubs behind, it would not have affected her judgment in the least. She would have replied that all Americans had some such origin; and nothing amused her more than their ancestral pretensions. “New is new, and republics are republics,” she said once to Mrs. Macmanus, when discussing a grande dame from New York. “What silly asses they are to talk ‘family’ in Europe! We like some and we don’t others, and that’s all there is to it.”

As neither painted, she and Mrs. Bode kissed each other warmly, and, the American having had her fill of ruins long since, they went off to a comfortable fireside to gossip, leaving Emily and Daniel to Julia. The little girl was openly rebellious, when ordered to investigate the ruined portion of the castle, but Daniel would have followed Julia straight out into the North Sea. He had never been insensible to the charm of girls, but here was a goddess, and he proceeded to worship her in the whole-hearted fashion of fifteen, and with an enthusiasm the more possessing as it knew no guile.

They wandered through old rooms and passages, under and over ground, ivy-draped and stark, Julia recounting the castle’s many histories. Emily lagged behind and wilfully closed her ears. Finally, having emerged upon the flat roof of a tower, she saw that she could find her way back to the garden without getting lost, announced her intention curtly, and ran down the spiral stair.

“Good riddance,” said her brother, as he and Julia sat down to rest. “But I don’t blame her. This is the last dinky old castle that I look at this trip. America for me, anyhow. Don’t think I’m a Western savage—that is what Cherry calls me—it’s awfully good of you to climb round like this and spiel off such a lot, and this really is the dandiest castle I’ve seen. But I’ve been dragged through about a hundred, and as for pictures—wow! They can only be counted by miles. I’ll never look at another as long as I live. Give me chromos, anyhow. We have some in the garret at home, and I like them better than the old masters—got some color and go in them, and not so much religion.”

Julia laughed outright. She thought him a young barbarian, but refreshing as the crystal water of a spring after too much old burgundy—this simile inspired by memory of the army of aristocrats she had met since her arrival in England. These gentlemen, most of them splendid to look at, were either formal and correct even when most languid, or bit their ideas out in slang, giving the impression that they thought in slang, dreamed in slang, indubitably made love in it; but it was a slang, which, loose and ugly as it might be, often meaningless, seemed to cry “hands off” to all without the pale. Some were affected, but all of these were affected in precisely the same way. Each and every one was full of an inherited wisdom which betrayed itself in manner and certain rigid mental attitudes, even where brain was lacking. To Julia, at this moment, they seemed in an advanced stage of petrifaction. Even Nigel was a grandfather in comparison with this bright green shoot from the new world. And Julia warmed to his frank admiration. The men to whom she had done duty as hostess since the 15th of September had paid her little or no attention. They were interested in some one else, they found her too young, they were too tired for flirtation after a long day with the guns, or they were wary about “poaching on the preserves of a cad like France. He had a look in his eye at times that would warn any man off.”

Whatever the cause, Julia, whose natural feminine instinct for conquest had been awakened during her brief season in London while she was still a girl, and who missed Nigel’s adoration, was willing to accept her due at the hands of fifteen, nothing better offering. Besides, the boy amused her, and she was seldom amused these days.

“Tell me more about California,” she said; and under a rapid fire of questions Dan artlessly revealed the history of his family (he was very proud of it), and, incidentally, told her much of the social peculiarities of his city. It was a strange story to Julia, who knew nothing of young civilizations, and was profoundly imbued with a respect for aristocracies. She felt that she should place this young scion of a quite terrible family somewhere between the steward of Bosquith and Mr. Leggins; but when she looked squarely into that open ingenuous fearless almost arrogant face, the face of an intelligent boy born in a land whose theory is equality, and in whose short life poverty and snubs had played no part, she found herself accepting him as an equal. His face had not the fine high-bred beauty of Nigel’s nor the mathematical regularity of her husband’s, but the eyes were keener, the brow was larger and fuller, the mouth more mobile than any she knew; and these divergencies fascinated her. But she drew herself apart in some resentment as he asked her abruptly:—

“What does your husband do for a living?”

“Do—why, nothing.”

“Nothing? Great Scott! What sort of a man is he? When American men don’t work, even if they have money, we despise them. They generally have to, anyhow. If they inherit money they have to work to hang on to it. Some of them drink themselves to death, but they don’t count.”

Julia had colored haughtily, but wondered at her eagerness in exclaiming: “My husband was in the navy, but he has resigned and is now a member of Parliament.”

“Well, that’s doing something, but not much. I remember, now, Cherry told me he’s going to be a duke. Then, I suppose, he’ll do nothing at all.”

“Oh, yes, dukes have to look after their estates; they don’t leave everything to their stewards; they take a paternal interest in the tenantry; sometimes they are magistrates, and sometimes they go to the House of Lords.”

“Well, that’s just playing with life, to my mind,” said young Tay, with conviction. “A man isn’t a man who doesn’t earn his keep and make his pile. I’m almost sorry my father is well off: I’d like to make my own fortune. But there’s this satisfaction; if I don’t work as hard as he does, when my time comes, I’ll be a beggar fast enough. Competition’s awful; and even people that do nothing but cut coupons for a living often get stuck. People are rich to-day and poor to-morrow, when they’re not sharp. Makes life interesting. But just living on ancestral acres—Gee! I’d die of old age before I was twenty-five.”

“I wonder if that is the way Ishbel felt?” murmured Julia, thoughtfully. Ishbel’s sudden departure from the tenets of her class had astounded her, and, in spite of explanations, she was puzzled yet.

“Ishbel?”

“Lady Ishbel Jones. She is the daughter of a poor Irish peer, and married a very rich City man. After five years of society and pleasure—she is beautiful and charming—she suddenly decided she wanted to make money herself and opened a hat shop in Bond Street. She would just suit you.”

But young Tay frowned and shook his head vigorously. “Not a bit of it. Women were not made to work, but to be worked for. If I had my way, every man should be made to support all his poor women relations, and if the women hadn’t any men relations, then I’d have the other men taxed to support them. It makes me sick seeing girls going to work in the morning when I am starting for my ride in the Park. And a rich man to let his wife work! I call that downright disgusting.”

Julia, much to her astonishment, resented this speech. “That’s tyranny of another kind. Women are not dolls. You talk like a Turk.”

“Turk? Dolls!” He arose in his wrath. “I’d have you know that American women do just about as they please, and American men are famous for letting them.” He added, with his natural honesty: “Some are strict and old-fashioned, like my father, but nobody could say he wasn’t generous. And what I told you is the reputation of American men, anyhow.”

“Well, sit down again, please. I am surprised. I thought you would respect Ishbel.”

“Not I. She’ll spoil her looks, and then where’ll she be?”

Julia, in a moment of prescience, asked with a mixture of wistfulness and disdain, “Do you care so much for mere beauty?”

“Betcherlife. I hate ugliness, and I love pretty girls. We have them in San Francisco by wholesale. To be ugly is a crime out there. I intend to marry the prettiest I can find just as soon as I’m old enough.”

“And some day—when she loses her youth and beauty?”

“Oh, I’ll love her just the same, for she’ll be my wife, and I’ll be old myself then, and have nothing to say. But I’ll have had the pick. I intend to have the pick of everything going.”

“Going?”

“In life. I must teach you our slang. English slang has no sense.”

“I fancy I could understand you better if you did. But I’ve seen men whose wives were once young and pretty, and who are always after some beauty twenty years younger than themselves—thirty—forty—”

Then she blushed, feeling that such a display of worldly knowledge was a desecration in the presence of fifteen summers.

But young Tay answered indifferently: “Oh, we’ve plenty of those at home. The bald heads always make the worst fools of themselves. But I mean to have a real romance in my life and stick to it. Shall only have time for one, as when once I put on the harness I mean to keep it on. I’m going to be one of the biggest millionnaires in the United States. Say, what made you marry so young? You don’t look more than sixteen.”

“I’m nineteen,” replied Julia, haughtily.

“Well, don’t get huffy. You ought to see how extra sweet Cherry looks when some one tells her she looks ten years younger than she is—”

“So does Aunt Maria!” Julia laughed again. “Fancy a boy like you noticing such things.”

“I’m fifteen, not so young for a man, particularly when he’s been brought up in a family of women. He gets on to all their curves—I tell you what! And I can tell you that many an American boy of fifteen is supporting his mother—whole family.”

“You don’t mean it!”

“I do. It’s not so easy, but it’s done every day. I don’t pretend there are not lots that let their sisters work, but that’s either because they can’t get along, no matter how hard they try, or because there’s a screw loose—foreign blood, most likely. No real American would do it. If pa died to-morrow, I’d quit school and go right into the firm. Nobody’d get the best of me, neither.”

It was impossible to resist such firm self-confidence. Julia looked at him in open admiration.

“Say!” he exclaimed, with one of his dazzling leaps among the peaks of conversation. “Would you mind letting your hair down?”

“Why—What?”

“I’d like to see all of it.” And young Tay spoke in the tone of one unaccustomed to have his requests ignored. “Do.”

Julia looked him over, shrugged her shoulders, then took out the combs and pins. After all, he was only a boy, and she was feeling singularly contented. It was seldom that she had experienced more than a fleeting moment of companionship. She had come near to it with Nigel, Bridgit, and Ishbel, but they seemed years older than herself, and vastly superior. She would have been unwilling to admit it, but at this moment she really felt sixteen.

“Jiminy!” exclaimed young Tay, as the breeze lifted the shining masses of hair. “There’s nothing to beat it even in California. Red? Not a bit of it. It’s the color of flames, and flames are a clear red-yellow—like Guinea gold.”

He didn’t touch it, but his eyes sparkled as he watched it float, or hang about her white face and brilliant eyes in their black frames. “Gee! But I’d like to marry you. Why couldn’t you wait awhile?”

“It wouldn’t have done any good,” said Julia, who, like most females, was of a literal turn. “I shouldn’t be here, but in the West Indies, and you might never go there.”

“Well, what’s done’s done,” replied the boy, gloomily, and with the agreeable sensation of being the blighted hero of a romance so early in life. “What sort of a chap is your husband? I shall hate him, but I’d like to know—”

“He—well—he’s—”

“You’re not so dead gone on him,” said the boy, shrewdly.

“Not what?”

“More slang. Not—oh, hang it, it doesn’t sound so well in plain English. That’s what slang’s for. How old is he?”

“Forty-one.”

“Great Scott!”

The boy betrayed his own youth in that exclamation, in spite of his precocious wisdom. Forty-one suggests senile decay to arrogant fifteen. Julia’s own youth leaped to that heartfelt outbreak, and she burst into tears.

Young Tay forgot that he was in love with her, and patted her heartily on the back. “Oh, say! Don’t do that!” he cried. “But what did you do it for?”

Julia, to the first confidant she had ever had, sobbed out her story. Daniel pranced about the roof of the tower and kicked loose stones into space. “I—I—hate him,” concluded Julia, then stopped in terror, realizing that she had never admitted as much to herself. But she squarely faced the truth. “I do. And—I’m—I’m frightened.”

“See here.” Daniel sat down beside her once more. “You’re only a kid, and this is the very worst I ever heard. Talk about cruelty to animals! I’ve read some of those novels that are always lying round the house—English high life, and all that rot—but I supposed they were all made up. I never believed that mothers really made their daughters marry against their will. Why, somehow, it sounds like ancient history. Say—this is what you must do—come to California with us. Cherry’ll manage it. She’s rich, all right, and manages everything and everybody. Then just as soon as I’m old enough I’ll marry you—see?”

“How could I marry you when I’m married already?”

“Divorce. Plain as a pikestaff. And I’ll take bully good care of you, and never look at another girl.”

Julia dried her eyes. The plan was alluring, but in a moment she shook her head. Her keen intuitions warned her not to mention the planets to this ultra-occidental person, but there was another argument equally forcible.

“My husband would kill us both. He—he—I’ve never seen him in a temper—he’s taking care of his heart—but I _feel_ he’s got a horrible one, and he seems to enjoy saying that if ever I looked at another man he’d strangle us both—”

“Pooh! I guess they all say that when they’re first married—”

“And he’s cruel to animals. Englishmen are seldom that. It isn’t that I’m really afraid of him now—it’s that I have a presentiment that I shall be some day. His eyes are sometimes so strange—not like eyes at all—just glass—he—he—doesn’t look human then.”

“He must be a peach. Gee!—but I’d like to punch him. You’ve got to come with us. That’s certain. I’ll talk Cherry over to-night. She’d just love figuring in a sensation with the British aristocracy.”

“Perhaps she wouldn’t care to offend it,” said the more astute female. “From all I hear, the rich Americans that come to London don’t do much to—”

“Don’t mind my feelings! Queer themselves. I guess not. But I’ll bring her round. Oh, don’t put your hair up!”

“It is time to go back.” Julia gave her hair a dexterous twist, wound the coil about her head, and pinned it in place. “You must have your tea.”

“Tea!” The contempt of composite American manhood exploded in his tones.

“Well, you can have whiskey and soda, although you’re rather young—”

For the first time Daniel’s magnificent aplomb deserted him. He flushed and turned away his head. “That’s where you’ve got me. I’ve had orders from pa not to touch alcohol or tobacco until I’m twenty-one. If I do, I’ll lose my chance of being taken into the firm, be put to work as a clerk somewhere, and get no more education. If I pull out all right, I’m to have ten thousand dollars plunk on my twenty-first birthday. You see the San Francisco boys, particularly when they’ve got money, are pretty wild. I don’t say I wouldn’t like to be once in a while, just for the fun of the thing, but I promised to please pa—he was so uneasy, and I’m the only son. But when I get that ten thousand I’m going to blow it in on a big spree—have suppers in the Palace Hotel, and throw all the plates out of the window into the court—just to show what I can do; then settle down. What I’ve made up my mind to do, I’ll do. I’m not a bit afraid of liquor or anything else getting the better of me.”

Julia, who was watching him, was puzzled at the expression of his mobile face. It was not so much that its natural strength was relaxed for a moment by some subtle source of weakness, as that the strong passions of the man stirred in their heavy sleep and sent a fight wave across the clean carefully sentinelled mind above. Julia did not pretend to understand, nor did any ghost in her own depths whisper of the future. She put her arm about his neck and kissed him impulsively.

“That’s splendid of you. And don’t you ever drink. It killed my father, and it’s killing my brother. And it makes people so hideous to look at. Now come down. I don’t want Aunt Maria to scold me. They don’t mean it, all these older people, but they humiliate me all the time. You are the only person I’ve met in England that makes me feel it’s not silly to be young.”

She picked her way daintily down the rough staircase, young Tay after her, again with that sense of being willing to follow her to the end of the earth. He even drank a cup of tea. But the ancestral hall, with its women in gay tea-gowns, and a few men who had returned earlier than their more ardent companions, made him feel suddenly very young and very American. He looked at Julia, whose place at the tea-table was occupied by Mrs. Winstone, and who was attracting as little attention as Emily, and felt more chivalrously in love than ever.

XV

MRS. BODE had come that afternoon to Bosquith with the well-defined intention of receiving an invitation to return and spend a week. Mrs. Winstone, who was about to be deserted by Mrs. Macmanus, and was growing more bored daily, now that the novelty of playing hostess for the Duke of Kingsborough was wearing thin, and meditated a round of visits to more amusing houses at no distant date, was delighted at the advent of the vivacious American and needed no subtle arts of suggestion to invite her for the following Monday. The children were included in the invitation, but Emily begged to be permitted to visit a school friend at present in London, and Mrs. Bode returned with the enamoured Dan.

She had been astounded, then amused at his plan to abduct young Mrs. France, but found herself forced to appeal to his reason. He had stormed about the hotel sitting-room, calling her names for the first time in his life: “snob,” “coward,” “heartless woman,” “no sister.” Mrs. Bode, whose good-nature was one of her assets, and immune to unspoken insults long since, refused to be offended, wisely repressed her desire to laugh, pretended sympathy, did not once allude to the fact that he was merely fifteen, and talked to him as a wise woman ever talks to a man whose common sense is for the moment in abeyance.

“Come back and get her when you are twenty-one,” she advised. “By that time you will be a full partner in the business, and father can’t balk you. You know how romantic _he_ is! And you also know his old-fashioned prejudice against divorce, his Puritanical morals generally. A nice figure we should both cut in his eyes if we returned with the runaway wife of an Englishman who hadn’t given her the ghost of an excuse. I happen to know France is mad about her. I also know she hasn’t a cent of her own, and she looks as proud as they make ’em. Do you fancy she’d live on our charity for six years? Not she. Even if she were mad enough to come, she’d go to work—”

“Work? My wife work? _She_ work?”

“There you are!” And, as a matter of fact, this argument clinched the matter. The moment he was alone with Julia after his arrival at Bosquith he informed her that within twenty-four hours after he was made a partner in the firm, and his own master, he should start for England—should use the ten thousand for that purpose instead of going on a spree. He should take her at once to the quickest place in America for divorce, and then marry her. Julia was much too feminine to laugh, vowed never to forget him, and during his stay at the castle devoted herself to his entertainment. He showed no disposition to be sentimental, and as it was a novel experience, and he was always bright and amusing, besides telling her much of his strange continent, she enjoyed herself thoroughly.

Young Tay, aside from his natural jealousy, took an immediate and profound dislike to France, a sensation inspired in most moderately decent men by that reprobate, even when he was on his good behavior. Dan went so far as to avoid his vicinity lest he punch him. As for France, he was little more than aware of the youth’s presence in the castle, and thought Julia damned good-natured to talk to him. That they spent their days riding over the moors, or along the cliffs, or sitting in the various romantic nooks of garden and ruin, he had, of course, no suspicion, or he might have concluded that his wife carried her notions of hospitality a bit too far.

When young Tay left, Julia kissed him good-by, gave him a lock of her hair, intimated that six years would seem an eternity, promised to write once a week, then cruelly forgot him, save when his postcards arrived.

At first they came in a shower, then straggled along for a year, finally ceased after an apologetic one from college. Julia answered a few of them, but boys of fifteen, no matter how clever and companionable, cannot hope to make a very deep impression on nineteen; and Julia had much to drive him from her mind, in any case. She rarely saw Mrs. Bode during that lady’s frequent visits to London, and, had she thought about the matter at all, would have ticketed Tay as one of the few amusing episodes in her life, and assumed that he had gone out of it forever. A young wife, revolting in profound distaste from her husband, and at the same time high-minded and fastidious, is the most unimpressionable of human beings. All men are alike hateful to her.

XVI

IN December and January two historical events caused an excitement into which Julia threw herself so whole-heartedly that for a time she managed to forget her personal life; taking pains to become intimate with every detail, she was obligingly conversed with by some of the important older men at Bosquith, and pronounced by the younger to be “waking up.”

On December 17 the President of the United States, Mr. Cleveland, sent his famous message to Congress concerning the long-standing dispute between England and Venezuela as to the boundaries between that state and British Guiana. The United States had proposed arbitration; Lord Salisbury would have none of it, intimating that England knew what belonged to her without being told. Whereupon Mr. Cleveland hurled his bomb: Congress, after being reminded of the Monroe Doctrine (which accumulates mould from long intervals of disuse), was requested to authorize the President to appoint a boundary commission whose findings would be “imposed upon Great Britain by all the resources of the United States.”

There was a financial panic (in which, incidentally, Mr. Jones lost a great deal of money), the newspapers thundered, Mr. Cleveland, at Bosquith, as elsewhere, was called an “ignorant firebrand,” and “no doubt a well-meaning bourgeois,” everybody tried to understand the Monroe Doctrine that they might despise it, and for nearly a week war between the two countries seemed imminent.

Mr. Cleveland went fishing and was unapproachable until the excitement had subsided. Lord Salisbury consented to the Boundary Commission, with modifications; and the whole matter was forgotten on New Year’s Day in a far more picturesque sensation, and one productive of far graver results: England was electrified with news of the Jameson Raid. Over this episode feeling for and against the impulsive doctor ran so high, before all the facts came to light, that more than one house-party was threatened with disruption; although in the main it was the young people with warm adventurous blood that sympathized, and alarmed older heads that condemned. “Little Englanders,” “Imperialists,” exploded like bombs at every table, even after a hard day with guns or hounds. But although the excitement lasted all through the hunting season (with which it did not interfere in the least), the chief advantage derived from it by Julia was a romantic interest in a new and mighty personality. For long after she kept a scrap book about Cecil Rhodes, followed his testimony before the special committee in Westminster with breathless interest, trying to find it as picturesque as Macaulay’s “Trial of Warren Hastings,” which she read at the time; and, until life became too personal, consoled herself with the belief that he was the man heaven had made for her. This fact would not be worth mentioning save that half the women in England were cherishing the same belief. These liaisons in the air have cheated the divorce court and saved the hearthstone far oftener than man has the least idea of.

The duke returned to London two days before the opening of Parliament, and took his household with him. France, now quite restored to health, bitterly resented leaving the country before the hunting was over, and Julia, who felt her happiest and freest when on a horse, and had proved herself a fine cross-country rider, had no desire to be shut up in a gloomy London house during what for England was still midwinter. But France dared not sulk aloud, and Julia was doing her best to be philosophical. Besides, she was to have a purely feminine compensation.

Mrs. Winstone, accepting the invitation of Mrs. Macmanus, had gone to the Riviera to remain until mid-April, but before she left she had given France several hints on the subject of his wife’s wardrobe for the coming season. In consequence, on the morning after their arrival in London, he entered his wife’s room at seven o’clock, attired for his morning ride, awakened her, and handed over a check for fifty pounds.

“Your aunt says that some of your fine clothes are not worn out and can be remodelled, but that you must have others and hats and all that rot. Women’s things cost too much, anyhow. They ought to make their own things. I’ve seen women do it. You must manage with this now, and as much more six months hence. It’s a bally lot, but you’ve got to have some sort of finery for our ball on the fifteenth. Don’t pay anybody till the last minute. They’re such silly asses it does me good to wring ’em dry. Besides, what are they made for? By and by when you know more about money, you can send me the bills for the same amount. But afraid to trust you now. Know women. By-by.”

He kissed her casually (not being in a mood for love-making) and Julia sat up and blinked at the check, the first she had ever held in her hand; Mrs. Winstone having had charge of her mother’s little wedding present, and the larger sum placed at her disposal by the duke.

She now knew something of the value of money. She also knew that her husband’s income, between his annuity, the rent of his place in Hertfordshire, and the duke’s allowance, was quite two thousand pounds a year. This would have gone a short distance if he had been obliged to set up in London for himself, but, living with the duke, his only expenses were his club dues, his valet, and his clothes, which he didn’t pay for. She had expected no less than two hundred pounds, and wondered at his meanness. There could be no other reason for the smallness of the check: there was no question of his fidelity to her, he pretended to despise cards (Julia already guessed that men would not play with him), and he did not even have to pay for the keep of his horse, as the duke’s mews were at his disposal.

Julia thought upon Mrs. Bode’s immense allowance with a frown, and wished she were an American, sent a fleeting thought to the still faithful Dan, and wondered if he would really come for her one of these long days.

To be sure Ishbel had spent quantities of money, but only to gratify an upstart millionnaire; and although Julia had now met many women with bewildering wardrobes, she knew that they were paid for in divers ways, when paid for at all. Still, she doubted if any of them had a husband as mean as hers, for most men, no matter how selfish, have a certain pride in their wives, and, in the absence of settlements, make them a decent allowance. And she, a future duchess of England, to get along on a hundred pounds a year!

“I should be paid high for living with him,” she thought as she rang for her tea; and had not the least idea that she was voicing the sentiments of thousands of wives, from the topmost branch of the peerage down to the mates of laborers that slaved to make both ends meet and had less to spend than a housemaid; whose rewards for work were her own.

But Julia was not troubling her young head with problems sociological and economic at this time. She knew that she had missed happiness, but she craved enjoyment, pleasure, excitement, and, if the truth must be told, unlimited sweets. The duke disapproved of anything but the heavy puddings of his race, varied only by “tarts” drenched with cream; and Julia had discovered an American “candy store,” and her sweet tooth ached.

As soon as she was dressed, she sought Ishbel and held a consultation with her in the little boudoir above the shop.

Ishbel could not suppress an exclamation at the amount of the check.

“Surely the duke—” she began.

But Julia shook her head. “Aunt Maria said he could not be expected to do more, as we live with him, and he gives Harold a thousand a year. But I know she expected me to have far more than this. She told me she had had a very satisfactory talk with Harold and was sure he would be generous.”

“Perhaps you can talk him over—”

“I’ll never mention the subject of money to him if I can help it. Why doesn’t the law compel every man to settle a part of his income on his wife? It should be automatic.”

“We are not half civilized yet—all laws having been made by men! But every woman of spirit gets the best of them one way or another, although her character often suffers in the process. That was the obscure reason of my strike for liberty. I see it now. There is nothing for you but to practise the time-honored methods. You have been placed in a great position and you must dress it. Get what you want. Your position assures you credit. Dressmakers are used to waiting, poor dears, and so are shopkeepers. Your husband will be forced to pay the bills in time. You will have to be adamant, impervious to rowing, when the days of reckoning come. Tell him that it is clothes or a flat in West Kensington, where nothing will be expected of you—”

“I hate it!” cried Julia, her eyes blazing, and her hair looking redder than flames. “I hate such a life.”

“Of course you do. So do thousands of other women; but as long as society, with all its abominable demands, exists, and men are unreasonable, just so long will we limp along on credit, and gain our ends by devious methods. Now to be practical. I shall make your hats at cost price, and France will not keep me waiting much longer than most people do. This afternoon I’ll go and look over your wardrobe. I know a splendid little dressmaker—Toner, her name is—who remodels last year’s gowns and brings them up to date. She is the only person you will have to pay at once, for she really is badly off. For your new reception gowns, ball gowns and tailor things, you will have to go to the smartest houses. I shall introduce you, but it is hardly necessary; they will fall down before you—”

“I shall feel like a thief!”

“Of course. You will be one, but only temporarily, and it will be much more disagreeable for you than for them. Your husband is not bankrupt, and must pay your bills. I wonder where you get your squeamishness from—at your age? You belong to our class, and from what you have told me of your life at home—”

“I know! Mother thought I didn’t know it, but I did. Children see everything. But it horrifies and disgusts me. I suppose I must be innately middle class!”

“Dear me, no. You are merely ultra-modern. I wonder what has waked you up before your time—and with no outside influences? Odd. Well, I fancy sensitive brains get messages, are played upon by waves of the intense thought that is in operation all the time, trying to solve the problems of existence. Bridgit was right. I thought it would take longer.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“She’ll explain when she gets hold of you! Oh, thank heaven I am my own mistress, and need never accept a penny from a man again,—and am done with the crooked ways of my sex.”

She looked radiant, and Julia exclaimed:—

“Why, you are more beautiful than ever. You haven’t gone off a bit.”

“Why should I?” asked Ishbel, in amazement.

“Well—I made friends with an American last autumn, and he thought it dreadful for women to work.”

“It is a toss-up which women suffer the greatest injustice from their men, the English or the Americans. At least our oppressions have developed us far ahead of them. They’ve only scratched the surface of their minds as yet—those that are known as the ‘fortunate’ ones. Of course there is a big middle class, scrimping hard to make ends meet, and, no doubt, having quite as much trouble with their men as we do. They will catch up with us far sooner than those walking advertisements of millionnaires, who think they are independent and spoiled, and are only slaves of a new sort. It is well, by the way, that I set up when I